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IN MANY PULPITS 



WITH 



DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 

EDITOR OF THE SCOFIELD REFERENCE BIBLE 



NEW YORK 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

American Branch: 35 West 32D Street 

LONDON, TORONTO, MELBOURNE & BOMBAY 
1922 



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Copyright, 1922 

by Oxford University Press 

american branch 



PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OP AMEKICA 

AUG -7 1922 

©GI.AB81258 



To 

HETTIE 



MY CHERISHED WIFE 

AND CO-WORKER 

THROUGH SO MANY, MANY YEARS, 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. 



LIST OF SERMONS 

PAGE 

The Best of All Good Resolutions i 

Waiting on the Lord 1 1 

The Deity of Jesus Christ 21 

The Most Important Question Ever Asked 41 

Man, A Three-Fold Being 49 

The Unrecognized Christ 59 

Is Life Worth Living ? 69 

" By Grace Through Faith " 79 

Barabbas or Christ 95 

The Demon of Worry 107 

Prayer 115 

Who is My Neighbor? 125 

The God of Jacob 135 

Song or Echo — Which? 149 

Did Jesus Rise? 159 

The Bible 171 

Quo Vadis? 191 

The Test of True Spirituality 201 

Serving Christ 213 

Out of Bondage 225 

The Mystery of Godliness 239 

Glorying in the Cross 255 

The Heavenly Pattern 267 

Compensating Visions 277 

Busy about the Wrong Thing 287 

Joy 297 

The Loveliness of Christ 309 



FOREWORD 

TVTY withdrawal from pastoral work that I might 

prepare for publication the Scofield Reference 

Bible, made possible the larger pulpit ministry to 

which many doors in the United States, England, 

Scotland, the North of Ireland and Canada were 

open. From that ministry this book is a selection. 

Some sermons preached to my own people in Dallas, 

Texas, and East Northfield, Massachusetts, are also 

included. 

C. I. Scofield 

Greyshingles, 
douglaston, l. i. 
February, 192 1 



THE BEST OF ALL GOOD 
RESOLUTIONS 



THE BEST OF ALL GOOD 
RESOLUTIONS 

"I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 
Father, I have sinned" — Luke 15:18 

I DO not know what day of what month of what 
year the prodigal said that, but I do know that 
for him it was the real New Year — the real begin- 
ning of life. The children of Israel sacrificed the 
Passover in Egypt on the fourteenth day of the month 
of Abib, but they were made to revise their whole 
chronology because of that event. 

"This month shall be unto you the beginning of months:" 

— Exodus 12:2 

No man who is wrong with God is really living. 
In the deepest of all senses, he is like the corpse in 
the death ceremony of an ancient people, who dressed 
in costliest attire the body of a dead friend and 
carried it about to their houses, seating it at their 
tables before the finest feasts. The cheeks were 
painted to represent life and the most flattering 
compliments were paid to what, after all, was a mere 
dead body. 

Let us consider together this good resolution of the 

3 



4 IN MANY PULPITS 

boy in the old parable. It was for him the best of 
good resolutions, because it began with the most im- 
portant fact in his life — the fact of his father. And 
the most important fact in the whole universe to each 
one of us is the fact of God. We are in God's uni- 
verse and we cannot get out of it. God made it, 
God sustains it, God rules it. It is all His. Every 
acre of ground, every blade of grass, every one of 
the cattle upon earth's thousand hills, every spring 
of water, every bird, every fish, every molecule of 
air — all are His. He has never parted with His title 
to one of these things. We are all tenants by suffer- 
ance. We till God's earth, breathe God's air, sustain 
life upon His bounty. We are absolute paupers, from 
king to peasant. The next moment, the next breath 
are not ours. 

Furthermore we all want to go to God's heaven 
when we die. There is no other heaven. Money 
can neither buy nor make heaven. The world, for 
whose opinion we care so much, has no heaven. 
Satan has no heaven. The heavenly things which 
are available here and now — unselfishness, helpful- 
ness, purity, high and noble thinking, clean living, 
love — these are all God's. Think then of the folly 
of living on wrong terms with God. Think of the 
unspeakable unreason of supposing that anything in 
life can be really right, till we are right with God. 

But who and what is God? Creation is an answer 
to that question. God is the Being who made this 
fair universe. He it is, who made this wonderful 
earth for man, and man for this wonderful earth. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 5 

He it is who adorned the heavens and sprinkled 
them with stars. He it is who painted the flowers. 
And it is He who made us capable of love and all 
the blessed relationships of life. That is one answer. 
The Bible is another. God is the God of the 
Scriptures. The Bible is the most human book in 
the world, because it reveals God at work in human 
lives, and at last reveals Him in the terms of a 
human life. What is God like? He is like Jesus. 

"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;" — John 14: g 

And in all the Book of God there is no more allur- 
ing portrait of God than that painted by the Son of 
God in the parable of the prodigal son. 

What is God like? Like this: 

"But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, 
and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and 
kissed him." — Luke 15:20 

"But the father said, to his servants, Bnng forth the best 
robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and 
shoes on his feet: 

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us 
eat, and be merry: 

For this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, 
and is found." — Luke 15:22-24 

We are all prodigal sons. The son in the parable 
committed his worst sin when he wished to be in- 
dependent of his father. When he said: 

"Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," 

— Luke 15:12 



6 IN MANY PULPITS 

his heart was already in the far country. The riotous 
living and the wasting of his substance were but 
details and mere incidental consequences. The Bible 
says that sin is anomia — lawlessness. When Isaiah 
says that 

"We have turned every one to his own way;" — Isaiah 53:6 

it does not seem like a very serious charge. But it 
is the sum of all iniquities. Self-will is the Pandora's 
box out of which come all the evils of earth. We 
have treated God evilly. The meanness of sin is that 
it robs a loving God of the love and fellowship which 
are his due. 
When David said of his greatest sin, 

"Against thee, thee only, have I sinned," — Psalms 51:4 

we do not at once see the truth of his bitter words. 
First of all, we think that his sins were against the 
husband whom he had wronged and the wife whom 
he had degraded. But whose creatures were these? 
They were God's; and every sin against a fellow 
man is tenfold more a sin against God. 

This prodigal about whom we are thinking, doubt- 
less did many a kindly act in the far country. It 
is the way of prodigals to be generous and to wish 
all men well. You and I have done that. We have 
had kindly thoughts and good intentions. We have 
wished other prodigals happy new years with all 
sincerity, and because of this, have thought well of 
ourselves. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 7 

On one of Mr. Moody's western campaigns, he was 
followed from city to city by an aged and broken 
man of venerable appearance who, in each place, 
asked the privilege of saying a word to the great 
congregations. He would stand up and in a quaver- 
ing voice say: "Is my son George in this place? 
George, are you here? O, George, if you are here, 
come to me. Your old father loves you, George, and 
can't die content without seeing you again." Then 
the old man would sit down. One night a young 
man came to Mr. Moody's hotel and asked to see 
him. It was George. When the great evangelist 
asked him how he could find it in his heart to treat a 
loving father with such cruel neglect, the young man 
said: "I never thought of him; but Mr. Moody, I 
have tried to do all the good I could." That is a good 
picture of a self-righteous prodigal in the far country. 
He was generous with his money and with his words 
— yet every moment of his infamous life he was 
trampling on the heart of a loving father. 

The other day, I met a foul old sot whom I 
knew as a beautiful boy and later as a handsome 
and high-spirited young man. But he was no more 
in the far country when I met him in his degrada- 
tion than he was when I parted with him in the pride 
of his youth. The far country is anywhere away 
from God. 

Did you ever think of the parable of the Prodigal 
Son as an unfinished story? Why have we no account 
of the boy after he came back to his father's house? 



8 IN MANY PULPITS 

Perhaps you have all felt what some forgotten poet 
has expressed so well: 

"You have told me, preacher, the story sweet, 
How the prodigal son, bereft of pride, 
Left the far country with wayworn feet 
And came back to his father's house to bide. 
You have told of the father, unfailing, fond, 
You have told of the ring, of the robe, of the feast; 
Of the long night's revel all care beyond, 
Till the Syrian stars grew pale in the East. 
But, O, could I more of the tale invoke, 
I would pray you tell me, thou man of God, 
How it fared with the boy when the morning broke, 
And his feet the old pathway of duty trod? 
Did he never forget that he ate with swine 
And suffered sore 'neath far-off skies, 
Remembering only the nights of wine, 
And the light in the dancing woman's eyes? 
Did he never go frantic with equal days, 
And long to the wide world prisoner-wise, 
Till a host rose up from the banished ways 
To beckon, and beckon, with gleaming eyes? 
If thus he fared, as we fare today, 
O speak, that the world may sing with joy, 
And tell how the father could banish away 
The beckoning hands from before his boy." 

Ah, that is why the story seems unfinished. 
When we have really come back from the far country, 
when through faith in Jesus Christ we have come 
to God and have found Him, through the new birth, 
our Father, — a new story begins, and it takes all 
eternity to tell it. 

There is a way from the far country to the Father's 
arms. The actual journey of the prodigal may have 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 9 

been across forbidding mountains and along caravan 
trails over blinding deserts. No such obstacles in- 
tervene between the returning sinner and God. The 
blessed Christ from whose lips fell the tender story 
about which we have been thinking, also said: 

"I am the way," — John 14:6 

When we come to Christ we find the Father, for 
Christ and the Father are one. And the way to 
come to Christ is to believe on Him; to put our 
whole life into His care and ordering, knowing that 
He has put away our sin by the sacrifice of Himself, 
and that all who come unto the Father by Him can 
never more lose the way. Let us say: 

"I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 
Father, I have sinned" — Luke 15:18 

"but know Thou hast saved me through Jesus Christ." 



WAITING ON THE LORD 



WAITING ON THE LORD 

"But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; 
they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run 
and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." — 
Isaiah 40:31 

LET us confess at once that these blessings are 
not usual in the lives of Christians. As a matter 
of fact we run and are weary, we walk and do faint. 
The wings of our soul do not habitually beat the 
upper air. On the face of it, it is very simple. 
There is a condition entirely within the reach of every 
Christian, whatever may be his age or environment, 
and then resultant blessings made sure by the "shall" 
of Almighty God: 

"They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; 
they shall mount up with wings as eagles ; they shall run, 
and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." 

— Isaiah 40:31 

If there is one condition thus performed, the re- 
sultant blessings are sure ; obviously then the absence 
of the blessing proves that we do not meet the condi- 
tion. Perhaps we have never stopped to read it 
very carefully. We like certain promises of Scripture 

13 



14 IN MANY PULPITS 

largely because we feel there is something strong, 
beautiful and triumphant in them, but we do not 
really consider what they mean. What does the 
Scripture mean by "waiting on the Lord?" Every- 
thing hinges on that. It is the sole condition. First 
of all, waiting upon God is not praying. Praying 
is petitioning God for something. Praying is 

"supplication with thanksgiving," — Philippians 4:6 

It has its own great and unique place in the Christian 
life, but it is not waiting upon the Lord. 

Three Hebrew words are translated "wait" in this 
connection, and three passages may serve to illustrate 
their meaning. 

"Truly my soul waiteth upon God." — Psalms 62:1 

The literal translation of this is "Truly my soul 
is silent upon God." That is not prayer, it is not 
worship. It is the soul, in utter hush and quietness, 
casting itself upon God. Take another illustrative 
passage. 

"These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them 
their meat in due season." — Psalms 104:27 

Here the word is the same, but it implies both de- 
pendence and expectation — a faith that silently 
reaches out to take hold upon God, and which has its 
expectation from God. Then 

"Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at 
my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors." 

— Proverbs 8:34 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 15 

The thought there is of a servant and his master. 
He has no service just at that moment, but he "waits" 
at the door, knowing that at any moment the door 
may swing back and the master may say, "My ser- 
vant, go; do this or that." It is the attitude of 
readiness, of obedience. 

Now I think we are ready to gather these passages 
into a definition of what waiting upon God means. 
To wait upon God is to be silent that He may speak, 
expecting all things from Him, and girded for instant, 
unquestioning obedience to the slightest movement 
of His will. That is waiting upon God. All the 
spiritual senses alive, alert, expectant, separated unto 
Him, His servant and soldier — waiting. It is not 
the waiting of an idler, it is not the waiting of a 
dreamer. It is the quiet waiting of one who is girt 
and ready, one who looks upon life as a battle-field 
and a sphere for service, who has one master and 
but one, to whom he looks for everything, from whom 
alone he expects anything. This is waiting upon 
God according to the Scriptures. 

Now, glorious blessings depend upon this attitude 
toward God. Are we waiting? Are we silent upon 
God? Is our expectation from Him, or from our- 
selves, or from the world? If our expectation is 
truly from Him, and we are willing to yield Him 
an immediate obedience, then we are waiting upon 
God. Then the four blessings of the text must fol- 
low, because God says they shall. Let us look at 
these blessings. 



16 IN MANY PULPITS 

"They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their 
strength." — Isaiah 40:31 

The word "renew" rendered literally is "change" — 
they shall change their strength. It is a word used 
to denote a change of garments. They shall lay 
aside their strength and put on, as a garment, strength 
from God. This whole fortieth chapter of Isaiah is 
a series of contrasts between the frailty and feeble- 
ness of man and the strength and greatness of God. 
Yet man is a being who fancies that he has some 
strength. And so indeed he has in the sphere of the 
natural, but it is a strength which utterly breaks 
down in the sphere of the Christian life. The prob- 
lem is to rid ourselves of self-strength that God may 
clothe us with His own strength ; and this is the first 
blessing promised to those who 

"wait upon the LORD." — Isaiah 40:31 

How does God effect this? I do not know, but I 
know that somehow when we are waiting upon Him, 
our strength, which after all is perfect weakness, is 
laid aside, and divine hands clothe us with the 
strength of God. We do change our strength. 

We now come logically to that great second bless- 
ing promised to the waiters upon the Lord: 

"They shall mount up with wings as eagles." — Isaiah 40:31 

What does that mean? Why as eagles? Why not 
with wings as doves? I think it is because the eagle 
is the only bird that goes so high that he is lost to 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 17 

sight in the upper heights. Think of some of the 
peculiarities of the eagle. He is the most solitary of 
birds. Did you ever see or hear of a flock of eagles? 
You may sometimes see two together, but very 
rarely. His eyrie is on some beetling, inaccessible 
crag. The eagle has to do with great things, moun- 
tains and heights and depths. An eagle can also be 
very still. No creature holds such reserves of quiet- 
ness; there is no restlessness in him. There is the 
repose of perfect power. He can be quiet when it is 
time to be quiet. But when the sun rises and his eye 
catches the first ray, you may see him stretch his 
mighty wings, launch out over the abyss and begin 
that tremendous spiral flight up, up, up, higher and 
higher, until he is lost to sight; and all day, on 
balanced wing, he is there in the vast upper realm 
of light, above all storms, in the great tranquillity 
of the upper spaces. That is mounting up with wings 
as eagles. To be up there, as we might say, with 
God. No Christian ever comes into God's best things 
who does not, upon the Godward side of his life, 
learn to walk alone with God. Lot may dwell in 
Sodom and vex his righteous soul with the filthy con- 
versation of the wicked, but God will have Abraham 
up in Hebron upon the heights. It is Abraham whom 
He visits and to whom He tells His secrets. Moses, 
learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, must go 
forty years into the desert to be alone with God. 
Paul, who knew the Greek learning and had also sat 
at the feet of Gamaliel, must go into Arabia and 
learn the desert life with God. 



18 IN MANY PULPITS 

Before God uses a man greatly, He isolates him. 
He gives him a separating experience; and when it 
is over, those about him, who are no less loved than 
before, are no longer depended upon. He realizes 
that he is separated unto God, that the wings of his 
soul have learned to beat the upper air, and that 
God has shown him unspeakable things. 

If we mount up with wings as eagles we shall often 
grieve the judicious, and must count upon some ex- 
perience of misunderstanding ; but we can keep sweet 
about it. We may avoid this. We may nest low 
enough to be understood by the carnal, turn sedately 
the ecclesiastical crank, and be approved; but if we 
take the upper air, we must, like the eagle, go alone. 
That is precisely our calling. Christ will never be 
satisfied until He has each one of us separated unto 
Himself. Hear: 

" If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which 
are above." — Colossians 3:1 

How far above? 

"Where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God." 

— Colossians 3:1 

Stretch the pinions of your soul, remember that you 
belong up there, and beat the lower air and rise and 
rise until you are with the enthroned One. You 
remember John McNeil 's story of the captive eagle. 
A man had a young eagle which he put in the hen 
yard with a clog on one of its feet, so that it could not 
fly, and there it grew up. At last, when the man 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 19 

was going to move away from that part of the coun- 
try, he decided to liberate his eagle. He took off the 
clog, but the eagle went hopping about just the same. 
So very early one morning he took the eagle and set 
him upon the coping of the wall just as the sun was 
rising. The eagle opened his eyes and looked for the 
first time at the rising sun. Then, lifting himself up 
he stretched his mighty wings, and with one scream 
launched himself into the upper air. He belonged 
up there all the while, and had simply been living in 
the wrong place. 

Now another blessing, the third: 

"They shall run, and not be weary." — Isaiah 40:31 

That seems like an anti-climax, as does the fourth 
blessing: 

"They shall walk, and not faint." — Isaiah 40:31 

What! must we come down and run and walk here 
on this stupid, prosaic earth after these eagle flights? 
Yes, precisely. The eagle flight is unto that. We go 
up there that we may serve down here, and we never 
can serve down here according to God's thought of 
service, until we trace the spirals of the upper air 
and have learned to be alone in the silent spaces with 
God. It is only the man who comes down from inter- 
Views with God who can touch human lives with the 
power of God. Yes, we must run down here, and 
walk down here, but only in the degree in which we 
know the inspiration of the upper air can we either 
run without weariness, or walk without fainting. 



20 IN MANY PULPITS 

What is the "walk"? It is the everyday of life. 
It is the getting breakfast, dressing the children, get- 
ting them off to school ; it is going down and opening 
the store; it is going out and feeding the herds; it 
is going into the study and opening the Word of God. 
It is whatever our appointed task may be. It is do- 
ing this all day, in heat and cold, dull days and bright 
days — the common life. It is this, the everyday 
walk, that tests and tries. Far easier is it to gather 
one's energies for a swift run sometimes than it is 
to walk. But we have to walk; we are made to 
walk. We live a common life, a life of everyday 
duty, plain, prosaic and unbeautiful. 

But we may 

"walk, and not faint" — Isaiah 40:31 

under the wear and petty vexations and frictions of 
everyday life, only on condition that we have been 
"waiting upon God." The man who does that will 
be a reservoir of sweetness, quietness and power. 



THE DEITY OF JESUS CHRIST 



THE DEITY OF JESUS CHRIST 

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God." — John 1:1 

I WANT to present to you, as best I may, the 
grounds upon which Christians receive Jesus 
Christ as God manifest in the flesh. Beyond all 
question, Christianity as a religion is committed to 
that proposition. Whatever it may call itself, any- 
thing less than that is not Christianity. Eliminate 
that and there is left a marvelous story, indeed, but 
like a box of wonderful gems to which the key is 
missing; there is left a wonderful ethic but without 
adequate authority; there is left the promise of a 
great spiritual kingdom, but the kingdom is without 
a king. 

Christianity stands or falls by the proposition that 
Jesus of Nazareth was more than man; in other 
words, while being man, that He was God manifest in 
the flesh. That is a stupendous assertion, but God, 
my dear friends, does not ask us to believe it without 
proof. What then are the reasons why we Christians 
receive Jesus Christ as God manifest in the flesh? 

Now, I shall feel more comfortable as I go on, 
if I say at the outset that the merits of my cause 

23 



24 IN MANY PULPITS 

should not be judged by my ability in presenting it. 
Truth itself transcends the ability of any man to 
present it. All the more then, if the reasons them- 
selves shall seem to you to be convincing and the 
proofs shall seem to you to be adequate, will you as 
honest men be under compulsion to accept them. 
Give me, then, your attention to that cumulative body 
of truth which establishes beyond all question this 
proposition — that Jesus of Nazareth, the historic 
Christ, was God manifest in the flesh. 

First, the four Gospels present the record of a life 
and the impress of a character which are absolutely 
unique. The Jesus of the Gospels stands alone. He 
makes a class by Himself. There are points of re- 
semblance between Cincinnatus and Washington ; be- 
tween Caesar and Napoleon; between Chaucer and 
Shakespeare; between Hesiod and Homer; between 
Dante and Milton; but Jesus is alone unique. 

I will not stop to prove that, because no one denies 
it, but I ask you to take note of three respects in 
which the character presented in thes3 four Gospels 
stands solitary among men. First, in that it is abso- 
lutely without sin. Now, neither in Scripture, nor in 
history, nor in fiction, nor in our own observation, do 
we find another of which that can be said. History 
gives the record of no sinless men. Fiction has never 
yet presented a perfect character. The effort has 
been made a thousand times, but upon the most per- 
fect character ever constructed by the genius of man 
is some fatal defect, some taint of imperfection. Did 
it not lead too far from the subject, it would be in- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 25 

teresting to take up some of the most perfect char- 
acters in the Bible, in history and in fiction, and 
show how true it is that, tested even by our own im- 
perfect standards, there is, in the best of them, some 
obvious defect. They are too strong or too weak; 
they are too tender or too severe ; they are all marked 
by excess in one direction and limitation in another. 
Not one but bears the mark of human frailty and 
imperfection. But the four Gospels present a sinless 
life. It is not merely that the four Evangelists assert 
that fact; they give us the life itself, so that we may 
see for ourselves that it was sinless. 

Again, the man of the Gospels is unique in that He 
is the only absolutely universal man, the only cath- 
olic man, the only man with no race mark upon Him, 
and who, as He reaches the differing families of men, 
interposes no race barrier. We know as a matter of 
history that He sprang out of Israel, that He was a 
Jew, and we are called to account for the fact that out 
of that most exclusive, most distinctive, most peculiar 
of all peoples; should have come the one universal 
man, who has no mark of race upon Him. You know 
how instinctively this has been brought out in art. 

As the gospel spread through Europe, there sprang 
up great schools of Christian art. Men strove to put 
on canvas and to carve in stone, their conception of 
the Christ. A very remarkable thing about it was 
that a Scandinavian always painted the Christ as 
blue of eye and fair of hair, just as an Italian always 
painted Him with dark locks and olive skin. It never 
seems to have occurred to them that He was not of 
their own race. 



26 IN MANY PULPITS 

One of the missionaries in Africa tells us that 
native converts in the heart of that country were 
greatly surprised when they were told that Christ 
was a white man — it never occurred to them that He 
was not black like themselves. Now, this universality 
would be singular enough if Christ came of Rome, 
or of Greece, if He had been born in one of the world 
empires; but He came out of a little nation which has 
ever had the strongest marks of race distinction and 
race peculiarity. More than this, He grew to man- 
hood in a remote village of Galilee, far from the 
slightest cosmopolitan influence. Try to imagine a 
Scotchman two hundred years ago, who had grown to 
manhood in Inverness, having no marks of the Scot 
upon him. Shakespeare, who has been called the 
most impersonal of all men, was an Englishman to 
his fingertips, and Homer was a Greek through and 
through. No human being, save Christ, ever escaped 
a race mark. 

The third respect in which the man of the four 
Gospels is unique, is that He was as perfect in the 
balance and proportion of His qualities as He was in 
His sinlessness. Not only was He a sinless man, but 
He was a perfect man, a rounded man. Now all other 
wisdom has been marred by some folly, all other 
strength has gone over into excess or violence, all 
other sweetness has degenerated into weakness. But 
Jesus was wise without folly, strong without vio- 
lence, sweet without weakness. 

In these three respects, this man of the Gospels 
stands alone among all men, the records of whose 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 27 

lives have come down to us, or which have been in- 
vented by the genius of man. 

Leaving the Gospels now, and coming on down the 
stream of time for the last 1900 or more years, we find 
the influence of Jesus in human history has been as 
unique as his sinlessness, his catholicity, or his per- 
fectness. In all history, no one else has influenced the 
course of human affairs or the trend of human lives 
just as the man of the four Gospels has influenced 
them. 

Napoleon, speaking of Alexander, Caesar and him- 
self, said: "We founded great empires, but we 
founded them on force. The principles upon which 
we founded our kingdoms were natural principles, 
but Jesus founded an empire which is indestructible, 
which is growing day by day, which is ruled over by 
an invisible king, and which is founded upon love. 
I," said he, "know man, and I tell you that Jesus 
was more than man." In history then we have the 
impress of Jesus Christ, and that impress is just 
as unique and peculiar as all else which concerns 
Him. These things are indisputable. 

Now, the startling fact concerning this entirely 
unique impress of Himself upon humanity is that 
Jesus said it would be so. He said for instance: 

"I am the light of the world:" — John 8:12 

Think of the audacity of that statement. A young 
Jewish peasant, a carpenter by trade, without learn- 
ing, without acknowledged rank, without wealth, an- 



28 IN MANY PULPITS 

nounces to a little group of converted fishermen and 
harlots and tax gatherers, that He is the "Light of 
the World." When uttered, it was a mere assertion, 
but after 1900 years have passed, it is a statement 
which admits of disproof if it is not true, or of veri- 
fication if it is true. Think of the audacity of it! 
Not Homer, not Socrates, not Plato, not Moses — 
it is no one of these, but a peasant, who says: 

"I am the light of the world." — John 8:12 

Well, after more than 1900 years, you may take the 
map of the world, and shade that map according to 
the degree of enlightenment, moral and intellectual, 
which prevails today among the nations, and you 
will find that where your map comes nearest to per- 
fect whiteness, there Christ is most known and most 
honored; and where your map shades off into abso- 
lute blackness, where the human mind today is in 
chains and darkness, where there is no picture, no 
statue, and no book, right there Christ is not known 
at all. 

Dear friends, here are these undisputed phenom- 
ena. No one can or does dispute them, and they 
are to be accounted for. That explanation which 
adequately accounts for them all, is the one upon 
which reason will set her seal. Is not that a reason- 
able statement? You may be interested to know 
that that formula belongs to the vocabulary of the 
exact sciences, not to theology. In the investigation 
of nature certain material phenomena are to be ac- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 29 

counted for, and science says: "That explanation 
which adequately accounts for them all, is the true 
explanation, " and reason says "Amen!" 

It can scarcely be necessary to refer to the various 
theories which have been propounded to account 
for the phenomena which we have been considering, 
but which have been abandoned as inadequate. It 
was said for instance, that Jesus was invented by the 
Evangelists; that the writers of Matthew, Mark, 
Luke and John invented the character which they 
present. It was pointed out long ago, by the un- 
believer Renan, that "only a Jesus could invent a 
Jesus." How does it happen that what the strenuous 
efforts of patriarch, prophet and priest failed to 
achieve, what the sublimest human genius failed to 
invent, these four writers accomplished with an ease, 
precision and naturalness to which every page of the 
artless narrative bears witness? It puts a greater 
strain upon credulity to believe that four men could 
have created such a character as Jesus than to be- 
lieve the simple, sublime and rational Biblical ex- 
planation of Jesus. How did it come that four dif- 
ferent accounts, written by different men at different 
times, in a different style, and selecting for the illus- 
tration of this character different incidents very 
largely, should all succeed in producing identically 
the same impression? If you read Matthew, you 
get the impression of a sinless Being, perfectly wise 
and universal. If you read Mark, there comes to you 
the impression of the same sinlessness, the same uni- 
versality, the same perfection of character; and if 



30 IN MANY PULPITS 

you read Luke and John, the impression is precisely 
the same. 

It does violence to reason and probability to say 
that such men could invent such a character. But 
the theory has passed out of the minds of men as 
inadequate and irrational, and I refer to it merely 
to show how men have striven to avoid the only 
reasonable conclusion concerning this character. 

Another theory which had possession of unbelieving 
minds for a time was the mythical theory of Strauss, 
the theory which said that the Jesus of the Gospels 
was a myth ; that the Gospels, as we have them, were 
slowly built up through some 400 years; that the 
first crude record was subjected to numberless prun- 
ings and increased by numberless inventions, until 
finally there came out the picture which we have of 
Jesus of Nazareth. Well, even Strauss abandoned 
this theory before he died, and he did it for this 
reason, that the severest hostile criticism was com- 
pelled to concede the authenticity of at least four of 
the Epistles of the apostle Paul; that they were 
written within thirty or thirty-five years after the 
death of Christ; and because of these Epistles of Paul 
there is the impress of the same character. There 
are the same affirmations concerning His personality; 
the same doctrine concerning His work and the pur- 
pose that brought Him into the world, and Strauss 
admitted that thirty years was too brief a time for 
the development of a myth. So that theory was aban- 
doned. Just recently, as many of you know, there 
has been discovered a work, known once to have 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 31 

existed, but believed to have perished, the Diates- 
seron of Tatian, the work of a man who was born 
in the year in which the apostle John died, and this 
work proves that the four Gospels, as we have them, 
were then in existence. Exit, then, the mythical 
theory. 

But the problem remains: we have to account for 
Jesus. How shall we do it? You know the Biblical 
solution: 

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God," — John 1:1 

and 

"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" — John 1:14 

That is the Biblical solution. Now, no one can ques- 
tion the adequacy of this solution; it perfectly ac- 
counts for all the phenomena. If this unique Being 
were indeed God, "manifest in the flesh," His sin- 
lessness is accounted for, the absence of all race 
mark is accounted for, the rounded perfection of all 
the attributes of His character is accounted for, and 
His unique influence in the world is accounted for. 
No one questions that; it is a complete solution of 
all the phenomena. 

Now we are prepared to see how perfectly this 
solution harmonizes with adequate motives for an 
incarnation. First, if God was ever to be fully re- 
vealed to man, there lay upon Him the inevitability 
that He should do precisely that thing. All of nature, 
all of history, all of the Bible is in truth the unveil- 
ing, the self -disclosure of God. If you look out upon 



32 IN MANY PULPITS 

the universe you see His handiwork. You remember 
how short, and it seems to me unanswerable, is the 
apostle Paul's argument from the universe for the 
existence of God. 

"Every house is builded by some man; but he that built 
all things is God." — Hebrews 3:4 

If we see a house we do not think that it was built 
by anything less than a man. We look out upon this 
great universe and say, "Nothing less than God has 
been here." From the universe we get a revelation 
of God's power. We get a revelation of His wisdom. 
But how far off that God is from a mortal being on 
this earth, stumbling along a dark path which he 
never trod before, and will never tread again, to 
fall at last into an unexplained grave ! 

When God puts His self-revelation into words, 
there is of course an immeasurable advance, yet 
after all, a kind of incompleteness. You know how 
we try sometimes to describe a thing in words. Then 
we do better than that; we make a picture of it. But 
when we are able to lead the person to whom we are 
endeavoring to communicate the idea, to the very 
thing itself, then the description becomes intelligible, 
the picture full of meaning. 

Suppose I were trying to describe to you the beauty 
of the sunset, and you had never seen a sunset. I 
might pile words upon words and fill them with 
color, yet I should give a very imperfect idea of a 
sunset. But if I could take you to some western 
slope, and let you stand there while the sun sank 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 33 

behind the cloud-palaces of the sky, fusing their 
dull greys into purple and scarlet and gold, and the 
glory and beauty of the sunset gave themselves to 
you, you would no longer need my words, you would 
know for yourself. Now there is God, infinitely 
tender and beautiful and glorious, and here are we, 
finite and stupid and earthly — can you think of any 
way by which it would be possible for God really to 
make Himself known to us, except to enter into a hu- 
man life and translate Deity in Its power and perfec- 
tion, Its light and Its love, into the terms of human ex- 
perience? That this is the only perfect divine mani- 
festation is felt dimly by all races; and there is no 
false religion (except Mohammedanism) which has 
not the thought of incarnation in it, the thought that 
the God they seek and whom they serve and worship, 
has at some time incarnated himself in a human life. 
Incarnation inheres in the very necessity of the case; 
and when you think of God adopting this expedient 
and really clothing Himself with human flesh for the 
revelation of that which He is, through the stress 
and trial of a human life, you have a motive which 
is at once God-like and adequate. If God had never 
been manifested in the flesh, if no prophet had ever 
predicted it, reason would compel us to anticipate the 
incarnation. 

Now this very thing is declared to have been the 
purpose of the incarnation. John says: 

"No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten 
Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath de- 
clared him" — John 1:18 



34 IN MANY PULPITS 

If you think of Jesus Christ in this way, if you go 
back to the four Gospels and study them with the 
thought of Jesus Christ as God making Himself 
known to man, you find that the manifestation satis- 
fies every demand of your heart and of your reason. 
The God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who 
answers in every respect to human need. He is felt to 
be at once a God worthy of adoring worship. He is 
felt to be a God of power and a God of wisdom, and 
a God of matchless, inexpressible love. No one has 
ever contemplated the character of Jesus Christ as the 
manifestation of God and has felt repelled from 
God by that manifestation. The power of God in 
nature may terrify, and an imperfect revelation of 
God through written words may perplex, but when we 
stand before God unveiled in Jesus Christ, we love 
and adore Him. It is impossible not to do so. 
Again, the prophets foretold the incarnation: 

"And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a 
small thing for you to weary men, but will ye weary my 
God also? 

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Be- 
hold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall 
call his name Immanuel.' , — Isaiah 7:13, 14 

and 

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: 
and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his 
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty 
God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." 

— Isaiah g:6 

Thus beyond all question, hundreds of years before 
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a prediction was ut- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 35 

tered that there should be born into the family of 
David, one who in some mysterious way should also 
be God. We may or may not believe that the proph- 
ecy was fulfilled, but that it is there no one can 
dispute. Now when we invoke prophetic testimony, 
my friends, we bring into court a witness never yet 
discredited. We have not only this prophecy that 
the Messiah should be in some mysterious way The 
mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of 
Peace, but we have literally hundreds of other pre- 
dictions, minute and specific, relating to nations, to 
countries and to individuals; and these predictions 
invariably have been literally and precisely fulfilled. 

The prophets foretold the place of the Messiah's 
birth and no one ever questioned that Jesus was born 
in Bethlehem. They foretold the family in which He 
should be born, the family of David, and no one ever 
disputed that He was born in the family of David. 
They foretold the tribe of which He should come, the 
tribe of Judah, and no one ever denied that Jesus 
came from the tribe of Judah. If in the life-time of 
Jesus Christ, or in the years of the first proclamation 
of the gospel, while the records were still in existence, 
the Jews had shown that Jesus was not born in Beth- 
lehem, that He was not of the tribe of Judah, and 
not of the family of David, every disciple would 
instantly have forsaken Him. They were not able to 
do it; they never disputed it — never. 

Of the many prophetic details concerning Jesus, I 
have called attention to three particulars which were 
literally fulfilled, and therefore reason compels us to 
give great weight to the prediction concerning His 



36 IN MANY PULPITS 

Deity. If a witness has always testified truthfully, 
the presumption is that all of his testimony is true. 
A third incontestable proposition is, that Jesus Him- 
self claimed to be God manifest in the flesh. Read 
the following passages upon that point: 

"Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw 
it, and was glad. 

Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years 
old, and hast thou seen Abraham? 

Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Be- 
fore Abraham was, I am. 

Then they took up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid 
himself, and went out of the temple, going through the 
midst of them, and so passed by." — John 8:56-59 

There then, was the distinct assertion upon the part 
of Jesus Himself that He existed before Abraham, 
and that He was the Jehovah of the Old Testament. 

"While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked 
them, 

Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They 
say unto him, The son of David. 

He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call 
him Lord," — Matthew 22:41-43 

Another assertion of His Deity: 

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the 
life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. 
If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father 
also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen 
him. 

Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it 
sufnceth us. 

Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, 
and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father;" — John 14:6-9 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 37 

You will remember that not once, but many times, 
this humblest of men, this meekest of men received 
the worship of His fellow men, an act of unspeakable 
blasphemy, a shocking violation of the First Com- 
mandment, did Jesus not know Himself to be divine. 
We have a marked instance of that in the twentieth 
chapter of John: 

"And after eight days again his disciples were within, and 
Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, 
and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. 
Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and 
behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust 
it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. 
And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and 
my God." — John 20:26-28 

Here let me anticipate an objection. You are say- 
ing that this is what Jesus says of Himself. Very 
true; but it shuts a candid investigator up to one 
of two alternatives. Either Jesus was the Son of God 
or He, the only sinless Being of whom any record has 
come down to man, was a conscious impostor, a 
blasphemous wretch, or he was a deluded enthusiast, 
one or the other. It does not matter which of these 
latter alternatives you take, the position is abhorrent 
to reason. That a sinless Being would consciously, 
deliberately commit the most flagrant of all sins in 
the violation of the First Commandment, 

"Thou shalt have none other gods before me" 

— Deuteronomy 5:7 

could be explained only on the ground of in- 
sanity. 



38 IN MANY PULPITS 

But the whole record of Jesus' life impresses a 
candid observer with His sanity, His strength of 
mind, His perfect wisdom and self-poise; and the 
effect of faith in Him as divine has ever been to purify 
the character and lift it up and sanctify it. On the 
other hand, were Jesus a weak religious enthusiast, 
you have to account for the undeniable fact that a 
self -deceived fanatic was the author of the only per- 
fectly pure religion which when applied to sinful 
lives has demonstrated its power to transform them 
into holiness. 

By either alternative, we are shut up to a greater 
inconsistency and to a greater demand upon our 
credulity than to receive as true the simple and 
sublime statement of the Word of God; that for the 
purpose of making Himself known to a race which 
had gone astray from Him, He in His infinite love 
and pity clothed Himself with flesh and lived among 
men that they might know Him, come to Him, trust 
Him and love Him. 

Remember, too, that other all-compelling motive to 
incarnation which grows out of our guilt. The most 
evidently God-like thing in all Scripture is the record 
of self-sacrifice of Jehovah for the sins of His crea- 
tures. Only a sinless one could make that sacrifice; 
only Deity could gather all sins into one expiatory 
act; only in the flesh could Deity become a sacrifice. 

Well, you have here a great mystery, and if the 
doctrine is true, that needs must be. 

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God." — John 1:1 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 39 

There is one mystery — God. How much do we 
know about God after all? How much are we, under 
human limitations, capable of knowing about God? 

"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," — John 1:14 

— another mystery. We know a little more about man 
than we do about God, but men are great mysteries. 
Two mysteries — the mystery of God and the mys- 
tery of man, and these brought together in the In- 
carnation. Indeed it would be a difficult religion to 
believe if there were no mystery in it. That there 
are mysteries in Christianity is the very mark of God 
upon it. 

We have, then, the fact of the Deity of Jesus Christ 
and it accounts perfectly for all the phenomena of 
His life and His character and of the influence of that 
life and character upon personal experience and hu- 
man history. No other theory will account for all 
those phenomena. Furthermore, it agrees with the 
predictions of the, prophets and the testimony of 
Christ Himself. Are we not, by these very processes 
of reasoning, shut up to the necessity of believing that 
this explanation is the only one credible to sound hu- 
man reason? Philosophy and Scripture agree in the 
consent that this explanation is adequate ; it accounts 
for all the facts and accounts for them perfectly. 

There remains the testimony, upon which I will 
not dwell, of personal experience. Suffice it to say, 
that for 1900 years, faith in Jesus Christ as a divine 
Saviour and Lord has laid hold upon the most de- 



40 IN MANY PULPITS 

graded human lives and lifted them up into purity. 
Faith in the Deity of Jesus Christ has transformed 
barbarous into civilized nations. It has established 
a new standard of right and wrong. Even those who 
do not accept the personal authority of the Divine 
Jesus know that that human personality is the foun- 
tain head of every blessing of light, liberty and law 
under which they live. As we stand before that 
gentle and loving and mighty Jesus, shall not our 
hearts confirm with trust and love the verdict of our 
reason, which compels us to proclaim the Deity of 
Jesus Christ to be the essence of Christianity? 

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God." — John 1:1 






THE MOST IMPORTANT 
QUESTION EVER ASKED 



THE MOST IMPORTANT 
QUESTION EVER ASKED 

"What must I do to be saved?" — Acts 16:30 

A QUESTION does not always imply a doubt. A 
child wants to know, and asks questions about 
everything; but a child asks because it believes that 
it is possible to know. So we can ask of Scripture 
the great questions that we must ask, if we are 
thoughtful and real. And we should ask questions, 
not because we doubt, but because we desire to know; 
because we believe that if God has given a revelation 
to man, He has answered in that revelation every 
reasonable question of the human soul, not every 
idle and curious question that might be asked, but 
every question that touches the real things of human 
destiny. Let us look at the questions that the jailer 
asked at midnight in the Philippian jail. 

"What must I do to be saved?" — Acts 16:30 

Many think there is an antecedent question: "Do 
I need to be saved?" Is there any necessity such as 
is supposed in the question? I shall not insult the 
intelligence of any thoughtful person by seeking to 

43 



44 IN MANY PULPITS 

prove what is already true to every honest soul — 
namely, the need of salvation. You and I know that 
in ourselves and apart from something that God may 
do for us, we are unfit for a holy heaven, and I should 
feel that I were trifling with you if I went into any 
elaborate proof concerning the need, that lies in every 
one of us, of a salvation. Let me simple re-state the 
grounds upon which I make this statement. First 
of all, we have all done, in thought and act, what a 
holy God can not approve. I do not stop to prove 
that. And secondly, we all feel within ourselves the 
possibilities of evil beyond anything we have ever 
done, therefore there is something in us that needs to 
be saved. 

When the son in the parable came to himself he 
gave a very good proof that he had indeed come to 
himself. He said, 

"I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, 
Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee," 

— Luke 15:18 

That is the first evidence of the sinner coming to 
himself. So long as the son in the far country may 
have thought, "I will arise and go to my father and 
say, 'Father, I have got into a bad environment; I 
was weak and they led me astray; and sin looked 
very beautiful and attractive, and you never told me 
much about it, and so I am in this plight/ " he has 
not come to himself. When a sinner comes to him- 
self, he says, "Father, I have sinned." Never mind 
about the influences, never mind about the environ- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 45 

ment — "I have sinned." This question of salva- 
tion, then, must be a personal and not an abstract 
question. 

You know a great many intelligent people, think- 
ing people, whose minds are alive and alert, lay hold 
upon problems and think about them, interested in 
the abstract questions that have to do with human 
responsibility. But this is not an abstract question. 
It is not what the man across the road must do to be 
saved, but what must I do to be saved. Furthermore, 
the question is specific: 

"What must I do to be saved?" — Acts 16:30 

If there is something the questioner would seem to 
ask that I must do, oh, tell me in no mistakable words 
what that something is. Be ambiguous about any- 
thing else, but not about this, for there is too much 
at stake. Don't darken counsel with words; don't 
fill the air with controversy about that. What is it 
I must do? 

There are many answers. Every religion that has 
ever appeared among men is an attempt to answer 
that question, from the crudest form of fetichism to 
the adequate and light-filled answer of Christianity. 
The savage who carves in a gnarled piece of wood 
an image uglier than himself and falls prostrate be- 
fore it, is trying to find an answer to that word 
"What?" I ask the Hindoo — and it is very fashion- 
able now to find a great deal of beauty in Hindooism. 
No one, I believe, finds any beauty in the practical 



46 IN MANY PULPITS 

outworking of Hindooism — oh, no, bless you; it is 
when in a Christian land and in the light of Christian 
civilization, and surrounded by all the comforts that 
have come to us from the influences of Christ, that 
men take the Hindoo books and find in them here and 
there a little maxim that they say is very beautiful 
— "just as beautiful as anything in the Bible" — 
but out there, where Hindooism is believed and lived, 
we do not find any pleasant fruits from it. But it 
tries to answer my question. I go to some filthy man 
who is pointed out to be as holy as men ever become, 
and say, "What must I do to be saved?" "Why," 
says he, "roll yourself on the ground nine hundred 
miles to a certain shrine." "Will that save me?" 
"Oh, no, not exactly save you," he answers, "but it 
may propitiate the gods, and the next time you are 
born you may not be born a monkey or a snake." 
Do I want that? That is not saving me. 

But there is a very much easier answer ready for 
me. I go to some generalizer and he says, "Why, the 
matter is perfectly simple — just be good." And then 
he has started more questions than he has settled. 
I ask him what he means by being good, and compar- 
ing his standard of goodness with that of the holy 
Being whom I have to meet some time, I find that 
the moralizer's standard of goodness is not high 
enough; it won't answer. And then, too, I have to 
say to him, "But, sir, I have a record; I have not been 
good. What am I going to do about that?" Oh, my 
friends, that was an awful word of Pilate's when they 
came to him and wanted him to change the writing 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 47 

over the cross. He said, impatiently, words that 
held a weight of meaning he little thought of then: 

"What I have written, I have written." — John ig:22 

Oh, yes, friends, what you have written, you have 
written; and what I have written, I have written. It 
is rather late in the day to try to save me by telling 
me to be good now. But I must have an answer. I 
am not saved and I need saving. And I turn to the 
Book of God and there I read an answer that seems 
to me so God-like that it wins my confidence at once. 
It seems adequate; it seems to cover the ground. I 
can find no flaw in it and it is beautifully simple. 
What is it? Let me take an instance. A pagan, 
whose office was that of jailer in the town of Philippi, 
had in his custody one, the apostle Paul. The apostle 
had been beaten with rods and his back was lacerated. 
For companion, he had one Silas, who had endured 
the same scourging. These men were brought to the 
jailer to be kept securely till the morning, and so he 
put them in an inner dungeon. And these two men 
sang in the night; and they had a God, and things be- 
gan to happen, and they happened in such ways that 
the jailer began to see that he was in the presence of a 
God who could shake the earth and fling wide prison 
doors, and he came and fell down in all his sins and 
pagan blindness and ignorance, and said, 

"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?" — Acts 16:30 

And from these men there came the answer which 
I give to you: 



48 IN MANY PULPITS 

"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt b* 
saved." — Acts 16:31 

There is not any other answer. 

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only be- 
gotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life." — John 3:16 

"Whosoever" — no matter what his place might be 
in the sliding scale of human guilt, away down at the 
bottom, or pretty well up at the top. The drunkard 
down here, and the thief and the harlot, and the 
moralizer up there — never mind — "whosoever." 
Well, that seems to me like God. 

"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." — Acts 16:31 

Now that is a reasonable answer. And what is belief? 
It is trust, that kind of trust that commits the whole 
case to another. Thousands are trusting Christ now. 
Many of them you know and they are the best people 
you know. It is reasonable, therefore, to trust One 
who has never been false to the trust reposed in Him, 
and it is reasonable because He can not, even with 
His divine power, save those who will not trust Him. 

"In whom we trust that he will yet deliver us; " 

— // Corinthians 1:10 

"For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our conso- 
lation also aboundeth by Christ." — // Corinthians 1:5 



MAN, A THREE-FOLD BEING 



MAN, A THREE-FOLD BEING 

"And I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be 
preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus 
Christ." — / Thessalonians 5:23 

WE live in the psychological age. Man, weary- 
ing at last of barren philosophies, each of 
which but devours the others, has turned away from 
the always futile attempt to harmonize the facts of 
being with the facts of the universe, and is trying to 
find out what manner of creature he is. The philoso- 
phies failed because they left God out. Science will 
fail because it leaves out the supernatural, and the 
new science of psychology is in utter confusion be- 
cause it leaves out the Biblical account of man. 

In truth the Bible contains a perfect philosophy 
and a no less perfect psychology. What is man? 
The new psychology answers, "Body and two kinds 
of mind, conscious and subconscious." Theology 
answers, "Body and soul, or spirit," making soul and 
spirit to be "in all essential respects identical," as 
a great Protestant theologian says. But the Bible 
answers that man is spirit, soul and body; and the 
Bible will by no means agree that spirit and soul are 
in any essential respect identical. The Bible calls 

Si 



52 IN MANY PULPITS 

these invisible parts of man by different names, 
psyche or soul, pneuma or spirit, and the Bible pierces 

"even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit." 

— Hebrews 4:12 

Briefly, the Scriptures attribute to the soul the 
emotions, affections, desires, appetites and the will of 
man. To the spirit, — the capacity to know, to 
reason, to remember. And these are so connected 
with the body that they are never to be permanently 
separated. Man may and does exist out of the body, 
— but the divine purpose is to unite again in resurrec- 
tion all human souls and spirits and their mortal 
bodies. The Christian at the resurrection receives 
his body purified from all that makes it often a bur- 
den and always a care. 

"It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: 
It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown 
in weakness; it is raised in power: 
It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." 

— / Corinthians 15:42-44 

What must be grasped here is the preservation of 
identity. "It is sown — it is raised." These bodies 
of ours are an integral part of our deathless per- 
sonality — spirit, soul and body — intellectual, af- 
fectional, physical. Such is man, a tri-personality 
as made in the image of Him who is triune. Through 
the body man has world-consciousness; through the 
soul self-consciousness; through the spirit, God-con- 
sciousness. Proverbs calls the human spirit 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 53 

"the candle of the Lord," — Proverbs 20:27 

because capable of being lighted from the touch of 
the divine intelligence. 

It follows that man may habitually live in either 
of these parts of his tri-personality, or in two, or in 
all of them. It is, perhaps, the most obvious fact 
of human existence that the enormous majority of 
men and women live in and for the physical part of 
their being. Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the 
Mount, pointed to this fact. He found the face of 
humanity covered with the mask of anxiety, of care, 
of apprehension. Over the face that God meant to 
be open, serene, beautiful, the centuries had written 
the wrinkles of care, of pre-occupation, of anxiety. 
And all about what? Food and raiment! And these 
things, in his rebuke, stand for the life of the body, 
the life of the senses. 

To live, to eat and to drink, to adorn the body 
and wrap the physical life in luxury — this He found 
both base and foolish. It was and is to lose the true 
perspective, to hopelessly confuse values. At the 
end of all our superficial reasoning and futile excuse 
it remains that to live for the senses is to descend 
in the scale of being. All civilizations have perished 
because wealth and power gave scope to the physi- 
cal pleasures of man. 

Rome begins with the two babes suckled by a wolf, 
and ends in imperial orgies where boundless wealth 
and power have laid the whole world under contri- 



54 IN MANY PULPITS 

bution to sensual pleasure. The product of the life 
of the senses is not a man, but an animal. Small 
wonder that men, minded to do nobler things, have 
gone to the other extreme, finding in the body the 
real enemy of the soul, and in hard asceticism 
the true philosophy of life. Over against the 
palace they have put the cell of the anchorite; a 
crust against the banquet; the hair shirt for the 
silken robe; the self-inflicted tortures of the flagel- 
lants for pampered passion. 

Between stoicism and epicureanism stands Christ 
accepting neither, rejecting both. As against the 
stoics, he stands for development, not repression. 
As against the epicureans, he stands for the rule of 
the spirit of man over his body, instead of the rule 
of the body of man over the spirit. Jesus Christ's 
first ministry was to the bodies of men. Disease, a 
physical consequence of sin in the world, was banished 
by His healing touch and word. He twice fed mul- 
titudes by His creative power, and He turned water 
into wine for the wedding feast. He did not find 
evil in food and raiment, but only in making them 
the chief concern of life. After His resurrection 
His own hands, so recently torn with cruel spikes, 
prepared breakfast for His hungry disciples. 

At the opposite extreme, some men and a few 
women live the life of the intellect. To acquire 
knowledge, to stimulate the creative forces of the 
spirit, to rule or rise by superior acumen and the 
play of trained faculties — these give the true use 
of life, as they think. To this end everything in 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 55 

life is subordinated. They live in disregard or de- 
fiance of every legitimate demand of the senses, and 
rule their emotions with relentless authority. The 
product is not a man, but a thinking machine. In 
religion they are ecclesiastics or theologians — never 
Christians. 

Another great company of men and women live 
the life of the emotions. They are swayed by their 
likes and dislikes, are unduly cast down or unduly 
exalted. Blown about by every wind of doctrine, 
they are unstable as water. Capable of great things 
in their best moments, they are incapable of any- 
thing at their worst. They are not men, but children. 

What, now, is the Christian doctrine? The answer 
will show that in Christ, His work and teaching, will 
be found the only true solution of the problem of 
right living for the three-fold being — man. And 
the first factor of the problem is the fact that in 
neither spirit, soul nor body is man in his normal 
state. His intellect is perverted by pride and am- 
bition. 

"Ye shall be as gods, knowing" — Genesis 3:5 

was Satan's first appeal to the spirit of man. By that 
sin he fell. 

"I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above 
the stars of God:" — Isaiah 14:13 

was Satan's impious boast while yet the 

"son of the morning!" — Isaiah 14:12 



56 IN MANY PULPITS 

The spirit of man by which God, who is a spirit, 
seeks entrance into the sphere of man's life, is barred 
to him by intellectual arrogance and pride. 

"The world by wisdom knew not God" — / Corinthians 1:21 

is the divine verdict upon the final result of the in- 
tellectual activity of man. 

"Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools," 

— Romans 1 '.22 

Christ found the intellect of man sunken in the sin 
of pride. 

The soul of man, the sphere of his affections, emo- 
tions and will, was and is, if possible, in worse case. 
Man, through his soul, ought to love God supremely. 
Instead, he loves self, loves sin. His will ought to 
be as sensitive to the movement of the divine will 
as the magnetic needle is to the magnetic current. 
Instead, his will is set to get his own way, to achieve 
the things which he desires. This is why so much is 
said in Scripture about the soul of man. It is 
through loving the wrong things that man has gone 
wrong. 

"As he thinketh in his heart, so is he:" — Proverbs 23:7 

In the last analysis the desires rule the man. When 
Christ takes captive the heart, he is sure of his ulti- 
mate victory over the spirit and the body. And the 
body of man is what sin has made it. The home 
and servant of the spirit and the soul, it has obeyed 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 57 

sin in the lusts thereof. Doomed to die, though the 
spirit and the soul can not, the body is filled with 
the seeds of disease, the heritage of weakness, suffer- 
ing and decay. 

Jesus Christ begins by making this problem of 
man's degradation of spirit, soul and body through 
sin, His own especial and exclusive problem. The 
only help He has from man in redeeming man is 
that man's intellect devises the cross, man's perverted 
soul hates goodness so much that it dooms incarnate 
goodness to the death of the cross, and man's body 
furnishes the hands which nail Him to the cross. 
All else Christ does. The blood which flows from the 
wounds inflicted by man atones for all man's sin, 
and purchases his complete redemption — spirit, soul 
and body. 

When this redemption is accepted by the indi- 
vidual, the processes begin which culminate in holi- 
ness. And holiness is simply "wholeness" — the 
restoration of perfect symmetry to the three-fold be- 
ing of man. And the model and exemplar of the holy, 
or "whole," man is Jesus Christ. In Him was a 
human spirit perfectly interpenetrated by, and per- 
fectly responsive to, the divine Spirit. The result 
was the most marvelous intellectual manifestation in 
human history. 

"Never man spake like this man." — John 7:46 

Transparently simple, and utterly devoid of literary 
artifice, His words have transformed human stand- 
ards, and created a new and wonderful literature. 



58 IN MANY PULPITS 

In Him was an emotional and volitional life per- 
fectly normal and perfectly beautiful. He was the 
exact opposite of the stoical ideal. Perhaps the best 
vision of the whole heart life and outward life of 
Christ may be gained by contrast — He was the pre- 
cise antithesis of a Puritan. All that a Puritan was, 
except reverence and morality, He was not. All that 
a Puritan was not, He was. 

He entered humanity as a pure stream enters a 
foul pool, cleansing it, but also renewing it. He put 
honor upon all the primal instincts and passions of 
man, while insisting that their only true development 
lay along the lines of purity and holiness. And His 
redemption brings the whole being into balanced 
symmetry and beauty. 



THE UNRECOGNIZED CHRIST 



THE UNRECOGNIZED CHRIST 

"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and 
the world knew him not." — John 1:10 

THAT was nothing new. The world has never 
known its prophets, its seers, the men by whom 
its life has been guided, endowed, enriched. The 
unrecognized Christ was only a kind of final and 
unanswerable proof of the invincible grossness, stu- 
pidity and unspirituality of that great aggregation of 
humans which we call the world. What moves us to 
a deeper wonder is that Christ, after nearly 2,000 
years, during which time He has reconstructed 
society, imposed upon even the world itself an abso- 
lutely new ethical standard and created a new type 
of character, should still be the unrecognized Christ. 
The sensation of one exhibition at the Royal Acad- 
emy in London was Goethe's picture bearing no name, 
but only the motto, 

"Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?' 

— Lamentations 1:12 

The picture, now well known through reproductions, 
represents the altar which Paul found at Athens with 
the inscription, Votum Deo Ignoto, "To the unknown 

61 



62 IN MANY PULPITS 

God"; only now Christ, wearing the crown of thorns 
and piteously bowed in prayer, is bound to that altar. 
The altar stands in the midst of the passing throng 
— the scientist with his test tube, the man of the 
turf with his whip and racing list, the society beauty, 
tempting in her rich robes, the vacuous-faced club- 
man, the newsboy shouting his papers, the laborer 
with his pick, the ecclesiastic in his vestments, the 
churchman and the dissenter in heated discussion, the 
officer in smart uniform, and all in absolute uncon- 
sciousness of the august and pathetic figure bound to 
the altar with its agnostic inscription, "Votum Deo 
Ignoto." 

It is a picture of an awful fact. Christ is in the 
world, — 



"and the world was made by him, and the world knew him 
not." — John 1:10 



To assert the presence of Jesus Christ in the world 
of today is not to appeal to faith. It is an appeal 
to observation. It is an appeal to human history 
for the last twenty centuries. Anno Domini is not 
an arbitrary date-point fixed by scientific consent 
for convenience. Demonstrably the world, in the 
year one of this era, began to be a different world. 
Modern society, in the large sense of that word, is 
not an evolution out of B. C. When Christ came the 
old civilizations were worn out. Liberty was dead in 
Rome, in Athens. The gods were dead. There may 
well have been more than fancy in the legend men- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 63 

tioned by Plutarch that at the hour of our Saviour's 
agony rowers on the sea heard a cry, " Great Pan is 
dead," and that the oracles ceased. 

And that dismal cry rose slowly 

And sank slowly through the air, 
Full of spirit's melancholy 

And eternity's despair! 
And they heard the words it said — 
Pan is dead — Great Pan is dead — 
Pan, Pan is dead. 

Elizabeth B. Browning 

Of a truth the oracles had ceased. In Rome, the 
augurs were laughing in each other's faces. The 
philosophers, those poor human attempts to solve the 
mystery of life, were spent forces. Pontius Pilate 
did not wait for an answer to his contemptuous 
question, 

"What is truth?" — John 18:38 

The quest of truth, even, was given up, and that is 
the last sign of despair. 

The world of power for which Rome stood, and 
the world of culture for which Greece stood, were 
alike sunken in immeasurable corruption. Nor these 
only. Judaism, the testing of man not by power 
nor by philosophy, but under the revealed will of 
God, had perished in formalism, as heathen culture 
had perished in sensualism. Jesus Christ called 
Judaism a 

"whited sepulchre." — Matthew 23:27 
The strict religionists of Palestine were the wall in 



64 IN MANY PULPITS, 

the way of the gospel. It was revealed religion, 
frozen into a heartless form, that demanded the cruci- 
fixion of Christ. The world was hopeless. Every 
avenue had been tried. There was no thoroughfare. 
Power had failed, culture had failed, religion as a 
system of human obedience had failed. There was 
another word, but the world had filled it with false 
and base meanings. It was the word love. There 
was a new center, but the world had missed it. It 
was God. The old dead world had confused love 
with lust, God with matter. Worst of all, perhaps, 
the old dead world had no certain word about the 
hereafter. 

Then Jesus Christ came and with Him the forces 
which have remade and are remaking the world. He 
enthroned a personal God at the center and made all 
life accountable to Him. He did not ask men to 
elect Jehovah God, but revealed Him as from ever- 
lasting to everlasting God, whether men liked to 
have it so or not. He made men see that they were 
in God's universe, and that they could not get out 
— that some time, somewhere, they must give an 
account of themselves to God. And wherever that 
conviction comes, the conviction of sin leaps into 
awful life. If God is, then I am undone. Against 
that conclusion all argumentation is mere trifling, 
unworthy a rational being. And, with that clew, the 
riddle of the world, as it is, begins to be read. It is 
perceived that the real malady is sin. The world is 
not right with God. 

Jesus Christ gives the eternal God a name. His 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 65 

name is Love. He has another name — Light. Light 
reveals that Love may heal. In the cross Christ 
fixes the measure of divine love. 

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, 
but have everlasting life." — John 3:16 

A perishing world need not perish; a dying world 
may have everlasting life. That opens the limitless 
future. Eternity begins to take on new meanings. 
Jesus Christ brought life and immortality to light 
through the gospel. Man is not the creature of a 
day; man is not a brother to the beasts. Life has a 
limitless perspective, and clear on to the endless end, 
God, eternal Love, is man's father and friend, if man 
will have it so. 

Atoning for man's sin by the blood of the cross, 
coming again from the dead in eternal triumph over 
the grave, Jesus Christ begins to carry the salvation 
of the cross into all the world. It is nothing less 
than the remaking of the world. Note the means. 
He begins by exalting the value of the individual 
man. It is the fulfillment of that old cry of the 
prophet: 

"I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a 
man than the golden wedge of Ophir." — Isaiah 13:12 

The old dead world did not think much of a man. 
This present world has not yet come to anything 
like the divine estimate of the value of a man. Men 



66 IN MANY PULPITS 

themselves hold themselves cheap, selling out man- 
hood for money and pleasure or ambition, but in so 
far as the individual has come to have sacredness 
it is due to the reconstruction of the world by Jesus 
Christ. Jesus Christ put the family, not the State, 
at the foundation of all social order. In the old dead 
world the State was the unit. The individual, the 
family were subordinated to the State. Under the 
new ideal human relationships came instantly to have 
sacredness. Home came to have a new meaning, 
wife to be a title of honor above which there is no 
other. The child became in its trustfulness and sim- 
plicity the model of the heavenly character, and under 
the especial protection of God, the object of tender 
care. Jesus gave the world a new ideal of character 
in the beatitudes, and in the graces of the Spirit: love, 
joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness and temperance. And for the realization 
of those graces He brought within the reach of the 
simple faith of the simplest child of Adam a wholly 
new life-principle. 

Beyond doubt the fact that by faith in Jesus 
Christ, through the new birth, man becomes possessed 
of the divine nature is the last of all the truths of 
revelation to get itself believed. Inveterately we 
persist in thinking of Christ as bringing to man a new 
rule of life, rather than a new life. Without this 
new life, imparted through the new birth, the new 
ethic and the new character would both be impos- 
sible of realization. And man received heaven as 
a home rather than as a court. We go on, I know, 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 67 

thinking of heaven as a kind of greater, purer, holier 
Olympus, but it is in spite of, not because of Christ's 
teaching. To him heaven is the home of the family 
of God. The children of that family were all born 
into it through the new birth. They all have been 
made partakers of their heavenly father's nature. 
And for near two thousand years now Jesus Christ 
has been at work through these tremendous agencies 
in the remaking of the individual and of humanity. 
And yet He is today, as He was 2,000 years ago in 
Galilee and Judea, the Unrecognized Christ. 

To Him is due the glory of every condition which 
makes life endurable for humanity today. No man 
would willingly live and rear a family in any part of 
the earth, however beautiful or fertile, where Jesus 
Christ is unknown, unhonored. Every distinctive 
blessing of life is His gift. He made the wonderful 
universe in which we live ; to Him we owe the sanctity 
of home, the honor of woman, the sacredness of the 
individual as against the tyranny of the one or of 
the many. To Him is due the new ethic which is 
grounded in mercy, and from which has sprung every 
orphanage, every hospital, every institution for the 
ministry of mercy to the unfortunate, the suffering, 
the needy, that exists on earth today. And yet mil- 
lions who live by Him, without the least of whose 
mercies life would lose all desirableness, who breathe 
the air, drink the water, and eat the substance of His 
creation, go on in lives which practically ignore Him. 

This would be pathetic enough, were this all. 
Were there no other consequence of thus ignoring 



68 IN MANY PULPITS 

the Christ from whom every blessing of life proceeds 
than deterioration of character such as follows habit- 
ual ingratitude, it would be bad enough. When it 
is remembered that deliverance from the power of 
sin and the guilt of sin, that membership in the 
family of God and eternal felicity turn absolutely 
upon the personal recognition of Jesus Christ in the 
sense of a joyous personal trust and adoring worship, 
then indeed the fact of the Unrecognized Christ be- 
comes inexpressibly tragic. But 

"this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which 
seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting 
life: and I will raise him up at the last day." 

— John 6:40 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 

TODAY we are to ask the Bible to answer the 
deep question, "What is the true meaning of 
life?" I shall not insult your intelligence by one 
word of argument as to the importance of that ques- 
tion. You and I are conscious that we are living. 
We know that the mysterious and wonderful thing 
which we call life is passing rapidly away. What a 
mystery life is — and one which science has not in 
the least helped us to solve. It is today the same 
inscrutable mystery it was centuries ago. That its 
issues are tremendously important, we know, and we 
ask what is the meaning, the true meaning, including, 
of course, the true purpose and object of life. 

As a truth about which our thought may crystal- 
lize, and which I believe opens essentially the heart 
of the question, I have chosen for a text: 

"For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to him- 
self." — Romans 14:7 

In other words, it is impossible for us to isolate our- 
selves from humanity and from God. We can not 
do it. Now, I want to plead, first of all, in consider- 

71 



72 IN MANY PULPITS 

ing this question of the true meaning of life, for a 
frank recognition of this fact. No life has found 
its true meaning until the fact is frankly recognized 
that the chief value of that life is due to the invest- 
ment which others have made in it. Your life is 
valuable to you, it is precious, in the measure in 
which others have made investments in it. The prob- 
lem that is before us is not a problem which can be 
considered without reference to past, present or 
future. Think of the tremendous investment that 
others have made in your life and mine. For us, 
mothers have suffered and prayed. For us, fathers 
have toiled. Teachers have patiently invested years 
of effort to win us from ignorance into knowledge. 
All this has been done that our lives might have 
some kind of value; and the first right thought of 
life is that we recognize that that which gives our 
lives chiefest worth has been invested in us by others. 
My friends, you and I are the heirs of the ages. 
For you and me Moses wrote and David sang and 
the seers prophesied. For you and me, Homer 
chanted his deathless lays, and a thousand men of 
genius have toiled and thought and suffered, that you 
and I might be what we are today. We boast of our 
liberty; we are proud of being Americans; proud of 
having a government "of the people, by the people 
and for the people. " Did you or I ever do anything 
much that we might be free today — free to say the 
thing we believed; free to come and go, free to live 
out our lives? Columbus crossed the stormy seas, 
our fathers followed him, and in their toil and pain 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 73 

and self-denial wrought out this new empire for man. 

"For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to 
himself." — Romans 14:7 

Can you dispense with all this increment of the 
thought and toil and suffering and sacrifice of the 
ages and go back to savagery? You can not do it 
if you would, and would not do it if you could. But 
how lightly you and I have been using this marvelous 
thing of life, as if it were only our own ! 

The second proposition is that no life has found 
its true meaning which does not take account of two 
worlds. The life that now is and that which is to 
come. Is it a credit to any one whose head is gray, 
that he begins to think of the other life? I would 
like to reach those whose heads are not gray, and 
plead with them to think while it is time, to redeem 
life from unbelief and baseness and selfishness and 
narrowness into faith and Tightness and nobility, to 
think of life as belonging to two worlds now. Two 
worlds, this one so brief, the other unending! What 
may be in store for us yonder? That is the question 
which lifts the temporary, the transitory, into 
eternal consequence and moment. What have I done 
today means something for me through all eternity. 
I have not begun to face the problem of life until I 
have seen that. 

Then, I want to say that no life has found its true 
meaning which is not right with God. That is one of 
the last things we think of. By what strange involu- 



74 IN MANY PULPITS 

tion of reason have men come to think that the prin- 
cipal business of life is to do approximately the right 
thing by our fellow man? Such a life leaves out of 
the problem its mightiest factor — the final, deter- 
mining factor of all life — God. 

Let us think about this for a moment. We were 
speaking of investments making life precious and 
valuable. Dear friends, the investment of the ages 
in you and in me, the heirship which the poorest child 
born in civilization has by the very fact of being born, 
is but the smallest part, after all, of the investment 
which God Himself has made in your life and mine. 
In the first place, He gives that wonderful thing 
which we use lightly and think so ignobly about — 
life. How can a life be right which is out of harmony 
with its Creator? Science tells us, — modern science, 
and so far I agree with it wholly, — that the problem 
of life is being in harmony with environment. That 
is right. What is the environment of every human 
being? God. 

"For in him we live, and move, and have our being:" 

— Acts 17:28 

According to science itself, then, no life can be right, 
no life can, in the best sense, be happy, no life can 
have any well-grounded hope of happiness in the 
future, which is inharmonious with God. How many 
things should move us to get right with God! We 
are in His universe, we can not get out of it. For 
weal or woe, for ever and ever, you and I must live 
within its utmost rim. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 75 

How many motives He has given us to make life 
right with Himself! Think of gratitude. We rightly 
call ingratitude the basest act of man. There is some- 
thing about ingratitude — there is something about 
the man who can receive kindnesses and favors with- 
out being moved to gratitude in return, that marks 
a kind of incurable baseness of nature. You and I 
have lived on God's bounty all our lives and perhaps 
we have never said with David, 

"What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits 
toward me? — Psalms 116:13 

And remember the answer: 

"I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name 
of the Lord." — Psalms 116:13 

It is all we can do. Gratitude should move every one 
of us to get right with God. Prudence should move 
us to get right with God. Reason alone tells us, — 
and with this the Bible is in harmony, as it is every- 
where and in everything with the highest reason — 
that there can be no enduring happiness in a life which 
is out of harmony with God. And we all want to be 
happy, do we not? 

Now, the very foundation thought concerning the 
problem of life is the thought of its being linked with 
all other life. Take, for instance, the matter of in- 
fluence. I am living, let me say, without Christ in 
the world. By as much as I am an honorable, a 
kindly, a worthy man, I am imperilling the eternal 



76 IN MANY PULPITS 

welfare of all who look up to me. If my life is a 
linked life, linked with other lives, what right have 
I to live one minute when my influence may leave a 
blot on another life? 

And the second thought, remember, is that we must 
take account of life as belonging to two worlds, this 
and the next. Can there be any more incredible 
folly than for us to live perilously on the verge of 
eternity, as we know every one of us does live, with- 
out being able to count tomorrow as ours, and to 
take all the chances of the unending days of the life 
beyond? Ought we not to be glad that God has made 
the issue between Himself and humanity so simple? 
What must we do to get right with God? What 
must we — all out of harmony in our selfishness, 
with His unselfishness, in our hatred, with His love, 
in our sins, with His holiness — what must we do to 
come into harmony with Him, to have our life beat 
in time with the life of the eternal? He makes one 
simple, definite proposition to us, and it is wrapped 
up, not in doctrine, but in a person. His one propo- 
sition is Jesus Christ. 

All life turns, in the last analysis, on the right 
answer to that question, 

"What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ?" 

— Matthew 27:22 

Pilate's question. Right with God, we are right with 
humanity. Right with God, through Jesus Christ, 
we are right for the next world as well as for this. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 77 

All the problems of life, the whole meaning of life, 
centers on that one thing — what is Christ to me 
and what am I to Him? I can not go back to the 
law — it only curses me, for I have broken it. I 
can not begin today, if it were possible for me to do 
so, to live so that every act of my life shall be pleasing 
to a holy God, for first of all I have no power to do it, 
and secondly, there is my record up to today. What 
can make me right with God? 

To do the thing He has commanded me — believe 
on Jesus Christ whom he hath sent. Trust Him. 
Give myself away to Him. Put my whole case into 
His hands. Let Him take this life, so full of evil, 
and put the evil out of it. Let Him take this life 
so full of weakness and fill it with strength. Let 
Him take this life so selfish and self-centered, and 
let it flow out in all its breadth to humanity. Let 
Him make it over. Let Him purify it. Let Him 
solve all its problems. Let Jesus Christ fill it. 



"BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH" 



"BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH" 

" For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of 
yourselves: it is the gift of God: " — Ephesians 2:8 

1 PREFER the rendering in the Revised Version. 
As slight as the change is, it is of very great 
moment, as a little reflection will show. 

"For by grace have ye been saved through faith, and that 
not of yourselves; it is the gift of God:" — Ephesians 2:8 

There is a vast significance in this change of tense. 
The Ephesian saints were not being saved, nor to be 
saved, but they were saved. That was the great 
message they got in this letter; and if there had 
been nothing else to give joy to their hearts, that 
alone should have filled them to overflowing. You 
see this, I am sure. Suppose you were sailing from 
one of our eastern seaports, that your destination was 
the other side of the stormy ocean, and you could 
be assured upon authority beyond question that your 
vessel should come into port. What a comfort it 
would be to you when you encountered the storms! 
When your ship, tossed here and there and beaten 
upon by the resistless waves, seemed as if it must 
surely go to the bottom, you would stay your hearts 

81 



82 IN MANY PULPITS 

upon the promise that notwithstanding the storm, 
you should come safely into port. 

The apostle did not say what trials they should 
pass through, nor from what trials they should be 
spared; he did not say what tears should come to 
their eyes, nor what joy to their hearts, but he said 
they were saved. These things might rend them 
asunder at times, might almost overwhelm them, but 
they were saved, and, being saved, knew that after 
the storm of life was over, they were sure to anchor 
in the port of heaven. 

Let us look at the passage itself. We have here, as 
you see, two wonderful things. First, a wonderful 
result; secondly, the wonderful means by which that 
result is accomplished. The wonderful result is sal- 
vation. 

"By grace have ye been saved." — Ephesians 2:8 

My friends, we have grown so familiar with that 
thought, that all wonder, strangeness and joy have 
gone out of it. I stand in amazement at my own 
apathy, at my own lack of emotion, at my own 
ability to speak in calm and measured words about 
so great a thing as salvation, accomplished for a 
doomed soul. Familiarity has done this for us. We 
count it a common thing. We are scarcely interested 
in it. Now and again people wonder why one who 
preaches does not choose the deeper things of God, 
why he is always talking about so familiar a thing 
as salvation. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 83 

I remember talking some years ago with a bank 
teller, and I asked him how it seemed to him to be 
handling vast sums of money all of the time. 
"Why," said he, "I never think of this coin and these 
notes as money, but only as so many figures upon a 
piece of paper." So, familiarity with salvation may 
make it seem to us as but a plan — words upon a 
piece of paper. 

A friend was telling me, that when visiting the 
home of a very wealthy man on the New England 
coast, he saw in one of the most beautiful rooms of 
the house, displayed among costly things from over 
the sea — rare pictures and works of art — a com- 
mon life preserver. "It seems to me," he ventured 
to say to his host, "a strange fancy of yours to hang 
up that ordinary life preserver among all these rare 
and beautiful things." "That," was the reply, "is 
where you make a mistake. That is not an ordinary 
life preserver, it is a very extraordinary life pre- 
server; it kept me alive four days at sea." Dear 
friends, when we think of salvation not as a place, 
but as that mighty transaction which gave us life, 
which keeps us alive and is to keep us alive, we shall 
get back the joy of it, and the wonder of it, and it 
will never become a common thing to us. 

The fact is, that to many of you, salvation never 
seemed a very wonderful or joyful thing. Your con- 
version perhaps was a very listless affair; so much 
so, that it has hardly left a trace in your memory; 
you do not know just when you were converted. It 
was a sort of sauntering out of darkness into light, 



84 IN MANY PULPITS 

and done in a very listless kind of way. May God 
send conviction in these days! David said: 

"The pains of hell gat hold upon me:" — Psalms 116:3 

And we should not wonder, therefore, when David 
came out of the pains of hell, that he began to talk 
about the joy of his salvation. Some one has said 
that the reason Mr. Moody preached the gospel with 
such power was that God had permitted him to look 
into hell and up into heaven. 

Salvation is not a common thing. Think what it 
is to be saved. It means deliverance from an awful 
doom. I do not know how awful, but I know some 
things about it because the Bible tells us some things 
about it. I know it is separation from God. It is 
separation from the good. I know that the Bible 
exhausts the resources of language to pen the horrors 
and woes, condensed into that little word which we 
spell with four English letters — lost. It is darkness, 
it is death, it is fire, it is the undying worm — and all 
these for eternity. Now, it is salvation from that. 
Is that a light thing? Is that a thing to be indifferent 
about? Is that a thing to get tired of preaching 
about? 

Then, on the positive side of it, it means pardon 
full and free; everything forgiven, everything for- 
gotten; the slate wiped clean, not one trace of our 
sins even in the memory of God; not one transgres- 
sion left, everything blotted out and gone. You 
know the promise: 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 85 

" I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions," 

— Isaiah 44:22 

When a thick cloud is blotted out, is there any scar 
left upon the surface of the sky? Is there any trace 
showing where the cloud was? No, it is gone com- 
pletely, and the blue is there just as blue as it ever 
was, just as clean as it ever was. That is in sal- 
vation. 

But salvation is more than that. The great thing 
in salvation is, after all, that it brings us into har- 
mony with God; it sets us right with Him. Did you 
ever think of it? it is not pardon which saves. The 
pardon removes penalty and makes salvation pos- 
sible. It would not be a kindness to set free all the 
convicts in the penitentiary today. It would merely 
be giving them an opportunity to commit new crimes, 
to load their souls with new guilt. But if one should 
go down to that sad place proclaiming pardon, and 
then put within each who accepted it a new heart, a 
heart that naturally and spontaneously of itself and 
without effort, loved honesty, virtue and right deal- 
ing, it would be a grand thing to turn all the convicts 
out of the penitentiary. That is precisely what sal- 
vation does. 

Skeptics ask why God does not save them if He 
wishes to. If God were to bring all unbelievers into 
heaven at their death, they would not be happy there; 
they would simply spoil heaven, and make it what 
this earth is. Salvation is reconciliation to God, 
loving what God loves, hating what God hates, and 



86 IN MANY PULPITS 

desiring, even against one's self, that God's will may 
be done. This is the larger part of salvation. 

I read a story about two excursions that went out 
of the harbor of Buffalo, New York. One carried a 
crowd of men going to a prize fight; the other carried 
a Sunday School picnic. It happened that one out of 
each of these crowds got on the wrong boat. A 
prize fighter got on the boat that carried the Sunday 
School children, and a deacon got on the boat that 
carried the prize fighters; and probably the two un- 
happiest men on Lake Erie that day were those two 
men, simply because they were out of their right en- 
vironment. The prize fighter was utterly miserable; 
and the deacon — you may imagine his feelings as 
he journeyed over the waters of Lake Erie with that 
swearing, hoodlum set. 

Salvation is not a question of locality; it is not 
a question of surroundings ; it is a question of being 
made right with God. That salvation does, and that 
is the larger part of salvation. Think of it, 

"By grace have ye been saved" — Epkesians 2:8 

made right with God, got a new heart. Salvation 
means becoming a child of God, coming into the 
family of God, sitting down at the table of God, as 
an heir of God and a joint heir with Jesus Christ. 
And it means eternal rest and peace and joy; and the 
eternal begins now. 

We have the wonderful means of salvation set 
forth in this text and that in two words, "grace" and 
"faith." Let us look at these words, 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 87 

"By grace have ye been saved through faith;" 

— Ephesians 2:8 

Not by faith through grace. Faith does not save; 
grace saves through faith. Grace the divine side, 
faith the human side. These two things must come 
together to produce salvation. Faith here, grace 
there. When faith and grace meet the man is saved. 
He is not being saved, nor to be saved, but he is 
saved. When his faith meets God's grace, the deed 
is done. 

" Grace'' — what is grace? There have been a 
great many definitions of grace — some have been 
helpful, some not. There is a story of a little girl 
who said, when asked what grace was: "Please, sir, 
it is getting everything for nothing." That is very 
good, but grace is more than that. If the little girl 
had said: "It is one who deserves everything bad, 
getting everything good for nothing," it would have 
been nearer a definition of grace. 

Grace is more than mercy; grace is more than love; 
grace is the largest word in the Bible. It is the 
greatest word, the most inclusive word, and holds 
in its contents more than any other word of human 
speech. Imagine a criminal guilty of having robbed 
his best friend. And will you just let me say, dear 
friends, that the most moral and respectable and 
decent man and woman in this audience has done 
that. No unbeliever here or anywhere else ever had 
so good a friend as God — never. For whatever we 
may have done or left undone, we have simply lived 



88 IN MANY PULPITS 

upon His grace up to this day — we have breathed it, 
eaten it, slept on it. We would not have been here 
but for His grace ; and it is He whom we have robbed 
of the affection that is His right due; robbed of the 
service that belongs to Him; robbed of fellowship; 
robbed of all that might give Him joy and requite 
His kindness. Imagine, I say, a criminal who had 
robbed his best friend and now stood before his judge. 
If the friend whom he had injured were to plead with 
the judge to have mercy on him, that would be 
wonderful, would it not? That would be marvelous 
kindness. If the wronged one were to come and plead 
with the judge for the ingrate standing there in his 
guilt, that would be wonderful. But grace does more 
than that. And if the wronged one were to love 
the wretch who had wronged him, really love him, 
that would be even more wonderful. But grace is 
more than that. To get a true illustration of grace, 
you must have the wronged one coming to the judge 
and saying, "Let the sentence fall on me; I do not 
ask that this righteous law shall be set at naught, and 
treated as a thing to be set at naught; the law is 
right. But let it sheathe its word in my breast, and 
let him go free." That is grace, dear friends, that is 
grace. 

"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the 
tree" — i Peter 2:24 

All the waves and billows of God's wrath went over 
Him whom we have wronged. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 89 

"By grace have ye been saved through faith;" 

— Ephesians 2:8 

What is faith? Grace reaches the sinner through 
faith; it is the channel. So much is evident on the 
very surface of it. It is not saving in itself, but only 
instrumentally. Some people have tried to make out 
that there is such a thing in Scripture as a faith char- 
acter, that God so approves of the faith principle, that 
for the sake of the Tightness of a heart which is ex- 
ercising faith, He pardons. The Bible knows nothing 
of that. The Bible is not a book of dreams. It is 
not a book of indefinite theologies. The Bible is a 
plain straightforward book, one that any wayfaring 
man may read and know; and it never speaks of 
faith character, or any other character as the ground 
of salvation. Faith is the channel through which 
grace comes. But what is faith? A skeptical physi- 
cian asked that question of a Christian patient. He 
said: "I could never understand saving faith. I 
believe in God and I suppose I believe in Jesus 
Christ — I am not conscious of any doubts. I 
believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, 
and I believe in the Bible, yet I am not saved. 
What is the matter with me?" "Well," said the 
patient, "a day or two ago I believed in you, I be- 
lieved in you as a very skillful physician: I believed 
that you would be able to heal me if I should get sick. 
Then I realized that I was sick, and I sent for you 
and put myself in your hands to be healed. In other 
words I trusted you. For two days now I have been 
taking some mysterious stuff out of a bottle. I 



90 IN MANY PULPITS 

don't know what it is, I don't understand it, but I 
am trusting you." Now, whenever you turn to the 
Lord Jesus Christ and say, " Lord Jesus, Christianity 
seems to me to be full of mysteries. I do not under- 
stand them, but I believe Thou art trustworthy and 
I trust Thee; I commit myself to Thee." That is 
faith. A very simple thing, is it not? The faith 
of the patient did not heal him; it was the remedy 
that healed him; but the faith took the remedy. 
Saving faith is the faith that takes Christ to save. 
But does not the text say: 

"not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:" — Ephesians 2:8 

and are you asking, What is it, this "gift of God?" 
There are three things, grace, faith, salvation, and 
these are all the gift of God. But here is the sig- 
nificant fact, dear friends, here begins your responsi- 
bility: of this wonderful trio — grace, faith, salva- 
tion — you have already received the gift of faith. 
Now you are saying: "If I have faith, if already God 
has given me faith, why am I not saved?" Because 
you have not used it rightly — that is all. 

Faith! Why, you do not go an hour of the day 
without faith; you could not live tomorrow without 
faith. You have faith in the banks; you have faith 
in the railroads; faith in your fellow man; faith in 
the family tie ; faith in the honor of your husband or 
your wife; faith all around; faith in every thing but 
the Christ who alone is worthy to be trusted. We 
trust everything that changes, everything that dis- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 91 

appoints, everything that fails, and refuse to trust 
Him who never fails and never disappoints. But 
we can not stand up before Him and say we have not 
the power to do it, because we are exercising faith in 
all kinds of inferior things every day of our lives, 
and because we have but to take that same faith and 
lift it up till it is fixed upon Him, and we have formed 
the bridge over which that marvelous grace comes, 
and grace brings salvation. 

"For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared 
to all men," — Titus 2:11 

says Paul, and it comes over the bridge of faith. 

I remember some years ago when the Southern 
Hotel in St. Louis was destroyed by fire, there was an 
inquiry made by the authorities into the cause of 
the disaster. Some of the servants of the hotel who 
had been rescued from the topmost story, right under 
the roof, by the heroism of an Irish fireman, were 
giving their testimony, and a question was asked of 
one of these servant girls: "How were you saved 
from this fire?" "Why," she said, "Mr. OToole, 
the fireman, broke into the room and said: 'Maggie, 
let me take you down the ladder/ and I let him. 
That is the way I was saved." 

Dear friends, do not make difficulties about these 
things where there are no difficulties. Faith is a 
gift and you have it. Grace is a gift and you may 
have it; and when you get it you will get salvation 



92 IN MANY PULPITS 

with it. That is the simplicity that is in Christ; that 
is the blessed gospel of God's free grace. But it is 
all a gift; it is not for sale. God is not trading in 
this matter of salvation; He is not giving a little 
salvation for a little goodness, and a little more sal- 
vation for a little more goodness. There is no trad- 
ing; it is a free gift. 

There was a poor woman whose little child was 
sick. She lived near Windsor Castle and could look 
over into the palace gardens and see the grapes grow- 
ing there. She thought how good it would be if she 
could have a few of those grapes for her little fevered 
child. So she took a shilling and went into the 
Queen's garden and said to the gardener: "I want to 
buy a shilling's worth of those grapes." "Do you 
know/' he replied, "those grapes belong to the Queen 
and the Queen does not sell grapes?" It happened 
that just then one of the Queen's children was stand- 
ing by, and he said, "My good woman, my mother 
does not sell grapes, but she will give you just as 
many as you need." 

Well, God is not selling salvation. It is a gift or 
nothing, and it is for you today. What are you go- 
ing to do with it? In His name, I ask you what are 
you going to do about it? What are you going to do 
with the grace of God before the close of this sermon, 
and it is nearly done? I have no warrant from my 
Master to give you one hour. You do not need a 
minute. People talk about "thinking it over;" you 
have thought it over all your lives. You need to act. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 93 

Will you trust Him, this Jesus who offers you eternal 
salvation through grace? 

"not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid." 

— John 14:27 



BARABBAS OR CHRIST 



BARABBAS OR CHRIST 

"And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder 
was cast into prison, whom they had desired ; but he delivered 
Jesus to their will." — Luke 23:25 

THIS text refers to the man Barabbas, of whom 
we know no more than is contained in the 
Biblical story. He swings for one awful moment into 
the light, is for that moment a silent figure on the 
stage of the most impressive and significant tragedy 
in the history of the universe; an unspeaking actor, 
muffled and sinister ; murderer, robber, brute ; an un- 
heeded pawn in the game of ecclesiastical bigots and 
supple politicians in which the stake was the life 
of the Son of God, — the amazed beneficiary of 
Christ's death. Then he passes, and we hear of him 
no more. 

Tradition, of course, has been busy with his name. 
His unsought connection with the central event of all 
history is too dramatic and suggestive to permit 
Barabbas to escape the myth-maker. And, indeed, 
there is nothing unlikely in the traditions. They all 
make him to have become a disciple of the divine 
Man who died for him — the severest of penitents ; 
dwelling in deserts and caves; bathed in unceasing 

97 



98 IN MANY PULPITS 

tears; forgiven, but never able to forgive himself 
that the adorable Christ should have died on his, 
Barabbas', cross. Let us hope that so it was. 

Did I say just now that Barabbas "passes"? No, 
we pass; Barabbas remains. The men, good and bad, 
who come into the old Bible story never pass. Not 
without purpose are they there; never, so long as 
men sin or repent, bless or curse, weep or laugh, win 
or lose in the tragical battle we call life, will those 
Bible personages lose significance. And none of them 
tells the story of the cross like Barabbas; no, not 
even Peter and James and John — not even Mary of 
Bethany, the most truly spiritual of all those who 
gathered about Jesus — not even Mary knows the 
depths of the meaning of the cross like Barabbas. 
Paul knows the theology of the cross, and its great 
ethical meanings, better than Barabbas; but no man 
who ever lived, except Barabbas, saw Jesus die on 
a cross that had been made, not for Jesus, but for 
him. Indeed, if you and I are to understand the 
central significance of the cross we must look through 
Barabbas' eyes. Let us try to do that. 

Barabbas was condemned to die. No one has ever 
questioned the justice of his sentence. Perhaps his 
mother, waiting outside there for the dawn of the 
morning — her boy's last morning — has been tell- 
ing the bystanders how sweet a baby he was; what 
a likely lad, brave and enterprising. But even she 
did not say that he was innocent. He was a rebel 
against the law, a robber, a murderer. And so are we 
all. We have broken a more just, a better law than 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 99 

that of Rome; we have robbed God of our love and 
service; and we have murdered our own innocence. 
Macbeth had but murdered sleep; we have slain 
white innocence. And the outraged law had laid 
strong hands on Barabbas, and he lay bound under 
sentence of death. Like us, he was not awaiting 
trial, but execution. He was not under probation 
to see if he would be good, but under doom because 
he had proven to be bad. Like us, he was 

"condemned already," — John 3:18 

Just before Barabbas, as his only prospect, indeed, 
was the awful death of crucifixion. He knew what 
that meant. Long hours of unspeakable agony; the 
hands and feet torn by great spikes; the wrist and 
shoulder joints dislocated by the dragging down of 
the body; each quivering nerve a separate torture 
through tension; a burning, unquenchable thirst; and, 
all around, a jeering, taunting mob. All the horizon 
of his life narrowed down to that. The only question 
was — when? Even that began to be answered. The 
jailors prepared three crosses. Ah! He well knew 
the three sockets cut in the hard rock out there at 
the place called Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. 
With the same thirst for blood that has made us seek 
to witness executions, he had often watched, out there, 
the agonies of crucified men. Was one of the three 
crosses for him? The very thought gave him a sense 
of suffocation, and of something clutching at his 
throat. Then he was told. Yes, he was to suffer in 



100 IN MANY PULPITS 

the morning. Two malefactors were to die with him, 
but he, as the greater criminal, was to have the place 
of eminence, was to have the middle cross. He ex- 
perienced a moment of virile pride. That was true 
to nature. You never heard robbers boast of their 
greater exploits, you say; you do not associate with 
that kind of people. Are you sure? Have you 
never heard men boast of the greater acumen which 
enabled them to win in the game called " business " 
while others lost to them? Have you never heard 
a "gentleman" boast of the number of drinks which 
he could take unmoved? Have you never heard the 
same kind of "gentleman" boast of favors which 
meant blight and nameless infamy, the ruin of purity, 
the shame of homes? Sin is not a nice thing, whether 
in Barabbas or in us. It is low, mean, cowardly 
and vile, — but sinners are apt to take a strange 
pride in it. 

The night fell — Barabbas' last night on earth. 
But it was a disturbed night. Even in the prison it 
was perceived that something unusual was occurring. 
Confused noises, outcries, the tramping of feet, pene- 
trated the thick walls. Barabbas dumbly wondered 
what it all meant. Perhaps it was another insurrec- 
tion such as he, poor fool, raised against the majesty 
of inflexible law. But the night wore on, and at last 
it was daylight — the light of Barabbas' last day. 
And now he heard footsteps, the key ground in the 
lock, his prison door swung open; but, just as he 
summoned all his brute fortitude for the awful ordeal 
before him, he heard the joyful words: "Go free, 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 101 

Barabbas! Another takes your place. Another is to 
die between the two malefactors!" 

As Barabbas emerged into the free, glorious sun- 
shine the crowd was already surging out toward the 
Place of the Skull. And then, if not before, the 
desire must have arisen to know who had been con- 
demned to die in his place. One can easily imagine 
how Barabbas followed the throng, striving eagerly 
to see the man who was to die for him. Perhaps it 
was not until the sound of the hammer, driving the 
spikes into the hands and feet of Jesus, had ceased, 
and the cross — Barabbas' cross — had been up- 
reared, bearing its awful burden, that Barabbas saw 
the man who was dying in his place. We may well 
believe that, moved by that strange, irresistible draw- 
ing of which Jesus spoke when he said : 

"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto me." — John 12:32 

Barabbas pressed his way through the howling mob 
until he stood, looking up into the face of Jesus. 
Barabbas knew Him, of course. His substitute in 
agony there was the new Teacher out of Galilee. It 
must have seemed a strange thing to Barabbas that 
Jesus, of all men, should be there on a cross. Again 
and again, no doubt, Barabbas had been of the throng 
which pressed about Jesus, and hung upon His words. 
Even the dead heart of the robber had been stirred 
by those words. Jesus did not exhort people to go to 
feasts, and perform religious ceremonies, but to be- 
lieve in Him and to be merciful and gentle and loving. 



102 IN MANY PULPITS 

In particular, perhaps, Barabbas remembered one 
day when the new Teacher seemed especially moved. 
The good, religious people, the influential preachers 
of the day, had brought against Jesus the damning 
accusation that He associated with sinners — in fact, 
that He went so far as to eat with them. Then 
Barabbas and the other bystanders saw in the sweet 
face of the new prophet something they had never 
before seen in any human face ; they saw the wreath 
of perfect love. And Jesus had told two stories 
which Barabbas had never forgotten. The first was 
about a sheep which had strayed away. The shepherd 
had ninety and nine good, docile, obedient sheep left, 
but, putting them into the fold in the wilderness, he 
went after his sheep that was lost. And when he had 
found his sheep he brought it tenderly home on his 
shoulders, and made great rejoicing. And the 
Teacher said: 

"there is joy in the presence of the angels of God" 

— Luke 15:10 

when just one sinner was brought back, as that sheep 
had been. That was new doctrine. Barabbas glanced 
at the good, religious men, — the men who prayed 
often on the corners of the streets thanking God that 
they were not as other men, — and saw their brows 
darken. Their doctrine was that the angels rejoiced 
when they saw Pharisees performing religious cere- 
monies. 

There was another story about a woman losing one 
piece of silver and sweeping the house till she found 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 103 

it, and Barabbas understood that Jesus was looking 
for sinners, bad people, as the woman looked for her 
silver. 

Yes, Barabbas knew the man who was suffering 
there on his, Barabbas', cross. He was a sinless man. 
Everybody agreed to that. True, the big preachers 
accused Him of being a Sabbath breaker; but every- 
body knew that He was holy. Why should such a 
Being be dying there a death of shame on Barabbas' 
cross? Even the august sufferer seemed to feel that, 
for out of darkness he cried: 

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 

— Matthew 27:46 

It is easy to see that Barabbas had no need to be a 
theologian to form a good working theory of the 
atonement. 

He knew that he was a guilty wretch, under the 
righteous condemnation of the law. And in both 
these respects Barabbas was a representative of all 
men. 

"As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:" 

— Romans 3:10 

"For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." 

— Romans 3:23 

"For as many as are of the works of the law are under the 
curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that con- 
tinueth not in all things which are written in the book of 
the law to do them." — Galatians 3:10 



104 IN MANY PULPITS 

Barabbas knew that the Sufferer before him had done 
no sin. He knew that Jesus was, for him, a true 
substitute. Christ was verily and actually dying in 
his place and stead; an innocent and holy Being bear- 
ing the very penalty which the law had justly decreed 
to him, Barabbas. Whoever, in the coming ages, 
might question whether Christ's death was vicarious 
and substitutional, he could never question it. 

"For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; 
that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." 

— // Corinthians 5:21 

"Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being 
made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one 
that hangeth on a tree:" — Galatians 3:13 

"Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; 
Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he 
suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him 
that judgeth righteously: 

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the 
tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteous- 
ness: by whose stripes ye were healed." — / Peter 2:22-24 

"For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the 
unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death 
in the flesh; but quickened by the Spirit:" — / Peter 3:18 

"But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised 
for our iniquities : the chastisement of our peace was upon 
him; and with his stripes we are healed. 
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned 
every one to his own way ; and the Lord hath laid on him 
the iniquity for us all." — Isaiah 53:5-6 

Barabbas knew that he had done nothing whatever 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 105 

to merit the marvelous interposition of that substitu- 
tional death. Whatever may have been back of it ; it 
reached him as an act of pure grace. 

"Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my 
dishonour: mine adversaries are all before thee. 
Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heavi- 
ness; and I looked for some to take pity, but there was 
none; and for comforters, but I found none." 

— Psalms 6g:ig—2o 

"But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith 
he loved us, 

Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us 
together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) 
And hath raised us up together, and made us sit to- 
gether in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: 
That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding 
riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ 
Jesus. 

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that 
not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 
Not of works, lest any man should boast." 

— Ephesians 2:4~g 

"Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, 
not according to our works, but according to his own pur- 
pose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before 
the world began," — 77 Timothy i:g 

"In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, 
promised before the world began;" — Titus 1:2 

"Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of 
grace, but of debt. 

But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that 
justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for right- 
eousness." — Romans 4:4, 5 



106 IN MANY PULPITS 

Bar abbas knew that Christ's death for him was per- 
fectly efficacious. There was, therefore, nothing for 
him to add to it. Just because Christ was dying he 
was living. The only question before Pilate was, 
whether Christ should die or Barabbas. When it was 
decided that Christ should die Barabbas was set free. 
Whether Barabbas became the disciple of Jesus 
who died in his place we do not know. What is more 
important for us, is to decide, each for himself, that 
we shall be His disciples. 



THE DEMON OF WORRY 



THE DEMON OF WORRY 

"Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, 
What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?" 

— Matthew 6:31 

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow:" — Matthew 6:34 

SOME of the things that Jesus Christ found in the 
world seem to have caused Him surprise. We 
are told that He marveled because of unbelief. That 
any one should doubt God caused the Son of God 
not indignation so much as astonishment. He felt, 
in the face of distrust of divine veracity or of the 
divine goodness, an emotion of simple amazement. 
And another fact of the life men live on the earth 
appears to have struck Him as foolish and unreason- 
able — the fact that the race of men is an anxious, a 
worried race. 

In the Sermon on the Mount He deals with this 
fact of worry. He gives to it more space than to 
adultery or murder. I should not conclude from that, 
that in the divine estimation worry is a graver sin 
than adultery or murder, but only that it is far more 
prevalent. 

Wherever Christ looked He saw the unmistakable 
traces of anxiety. All faces bore that sinister mark. 

109 



110 IN MANY PULPITS 

The Sermon on the Mount is the constitution of the 
kingdom of heaven on earth and that kingdom ex- 
cludes worry. God Himself could not make an 
anxious world happy. Let us see how Jesus Christ 
proposes to banish worry from his world. First of 
all, he teaches us that we worry about the wrong 
things. 

"Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, 
what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink ; nor yet for your 
body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than 
meat, and the body than raiment?" — Matthew 6:25 

In the last analysis we shall find, if we make that 
analysis fearlessly, that our worry is not about mere 
food and mere raiment, but about superfluous food 
and superfluous raiment, and our Lord would call 
us back to the consciousness that life itself is an in- 
finitely larger thing than the externals of life. The 
men and women who have touched this life of hu- 
manity powerfully and helpfully have always been 
such as brought the facts of life into the right perspec- 
tive, counting life too high and beautiful a thing to 
waste itself in overmuch thought about its mere 
incidents. 

Are we thinking thus nobly about life and life's 
meanings? Have we thought about life itself, the 
wonder of it, the deeper meanings of it, the measure- 
less possibilities of even one day of it? Do we habit- 
ually think of life as a trust rather than a possession? 
Do we think of sometime giving an account of our 
administration of that trust? Do we think of the tre- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 111 

mendous investment which God and humanity, and 
even the mere creature world, has made and is con- 
stantly making, just that we may have life? 

Then, too, Christ puts over against our causes of 
anxiety the fatherhood of God. 

"Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do 
they reap, nor gather into barns ; yet your heavenly Father 
feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?" 

— Matthew 6:26 

"And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies 
of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they 
spin; 

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these. 
Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, 
which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, 
shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" 

— Matthew 6:28-30 

The Christian is not an orphan in an unfriendly 
universe. He is a child of the God who feeds the 
birds and clothes the flowers, making each the subject 
of His solicitude. It has been estimated, taking as a 
basis the quantity known to be necessary for their 
sustenance, that no millionaire on earth could feed 
God's birds one day. But God feeds them every day, 
and is no whit poorer at night. "Now," says Christ, 
in effect, "that is what the Christian's Father does for 
flowers and birds. Will He not do as much for His 
dear children?" The argument is unanswerable. And 
it covers the very causes of that anxiety which is 
whitening the heads and prematurely furrowing the 



112 IN MANY PULPITS 

faces of God's children in the world. It is no wonder 
that men have imagined a multitude of invisible 
spirits at work upon the human countenance from 
the cradle to the grave, spirits of light and spirits of 
darkness, spirits angelic and spirits from the pit; 
that with viewless gravers they patiently inscribe the 
lines which mark every thought and action. Of course 
the deeper and even more awful truth is that human 
thoughts and actions are self-recording, and that, 
struggle against it as we may, that record is wrought 
into the substance of the human face. 

O, the records that faces bear! As our eyes grow 
wise to see, what confessions, fain hidden, stand out 
from the faces of the crowd! And no demon drives 
his pitiless graver deeper, nor with more certain 
stroke, than the hateful demon worry. And the lines 
he makes are ignoble lines ; lines in which he who runs 
may read the story of happiness of homes eaten away 
by little and little as with a biting acid ; of home made 
hateful to husband and children ; of love worn to the 
breaking point — and all about things that pass and 
perish with the day; things of no vital moment; things 
upon which neither the true happiness nor honor nor 
usefulness of life depend. O, the pity of it. O, the 
miserable shame of it, that on a face made beautiful 
by God there should be ignoble worry marks! 

Suppose such an one had trusted God about all 
those causes of anxiety. Suppose such an one had 
said: "My Father feeds the birds; He clothes the 
flowers ; He will assuredly feed me and mine ; He will 
clothe us." Ah, the happy spirits with the other 






WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 113 

gravers would have written on that face other lines — 
lines of serenity, lines of happy trust, lines which 
would have made the face a benediction and a blessed 
memory. 

Thirdly, Christ reminds the anxious one of earth 
that, after all, worry does no good. 

"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit 
unto his stature?" — Matthew 6:27 

The waste of it! The uselessness of it! All the 
worry that ever got itself accomplished in this weary, 
worrying world; all the sleepless nights, all the bur- 
dened days; all the joyless, mirthless, peace-destroy- 
ing, health-destroying, happiness-destroying, love- 
destroying hours that men and women have ever in all 
earth's centuries given to worry, never wrought one 
good thing. It was all evil and only evil. It shut out 
the face of God, the loveliness of nature, the joy of 
love, the compensations of life. It poisoned the peace 
of others and cast its hateful shadow over other lives. 
The very point of the sin of worry, the very reason 
why it is the basest, most cowardly of sins, is that it 
darkens the lives we are most responsible to bless — 
and all for no good, but only to blight and wrong. 

The amazing thing about it is that no one is con- 
victed of this mean sin! Good people live in it, and 
with no sense of the outrage which it involves against 
the love of a kind, heavenly Father and against the 
rights of others ! A Christian man will not scruple to 
bring to his home the petty worries and passing anx- 



114 IN MANY PULPITS 

ieties of the day. Christian women, — women whose 
lives are pure, who scorn scandal, who devote life and 
strength unsparingly to the service of husband and 
children, will yet shamelessly poison the peace of 
home by the sin of worry, and with no apparent sense 
of the guilt of it! It is one of the mysteries of human 
nature. 

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow 
shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto 
the day is the evil thereof." — Matthew 6:34 



PRAYER 



PRAYER 



"And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain 
place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, 
Lord, teach us to pray," — Luke 11:1 

THE Lord's Prayer is not a form, but a model 
which our Lord gave to his disciples. It is a 
prayer of the kingdom; a prayer suited to the dis- 
ciples at that time, when the Lord was preaching the 
kingdom as "at hand," and not the gospel of the 
grace of God, which tells of a crucified Christ and 
pardon for sin through him. Its abiding value lies in 
the fact that it is a model and not a form. One of 
our Lord's disciples, evidently speaking for all of 
them, had said, 

"Lord, teach us to pray," — Luke 11:1 

and the Lord's Prayer is part of his answer. Notice, 
first of all, the singularity of this disciple's petition. 
These men were Jews, and as Jews had been brought 
up to pray. They had always prayed. Further- 
more, they had been, many of them, John's disciples, 
and one of the things, it appears, that John taught 
his disciples was to pray. But here there is a desire 
unsatisfied. These disciples, who were brought up 

117 



118 IN MANY PULPITS 

to pray and who had been in a kind of preliminary 
school of prayer, still felt that they did not know 
how to pray. It is a good sign when a Christian can 
no longer be satisfied with religious forms; he is 
ready for realities. There is a tremendous contrast 
between praying and saying prayers. 

The first testimony which God ever bore to the 
apostle Paul after his conversion was: 

"behold, he prayeth," — Acts g:n 

Why, Paul was not only an intensely religious man, 
but an Oriental. All Orientals pray. In that land 
today a muezzin from the minaret of the mosque calls 
the faithful to prayer. "Come to prayer; prayer 
is good; prayer is good; come to prayer." Wherever 
a Mohammedan is, he spreads his prayer-carpet; — 
it may be in the street, but he kneels, and turns his 
face toward Mecca and prays, — prays until the per- 
spiration pours from his face, all unconscious of 
passers-by. So Paul had been saying prayers all his 
life, and yet one day he met Jesus on the Damascus 
road, and began for the first time to pray. From that 
moment form became intolerable to him, except as 
it clothed spiritual realities. 

Notice again, that it was the praying of our Lord 
Jesus, which suggested to His disciples their need of 
instruction in the art of prayer. 

"And it came to pass that, as he was praying in a certain 
place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, 
Lord, teach us to pray," — Luke 11:1 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 119 

I do not know what it was in Jesus' praying that 
suddenly brought home to these watching disciples 
the consciousness that they needed to be taught to 
pray. Whether it was the expression in the face of 
our Lord, of a radiant, triumphant trust in the Father 
to whom He prayed, whether it was a ring of certainty 
that God heard Him and would answer His prayer, 
whether there was an accent of reality in it all, so 
that it seemed to those disciples clear that their Lord 
was not engaged in a religious exercise, but was 
getting something from God, that moved them to 
ask this question, I do not know. But something 
in His praying stirred them. 

Have you thought of the prayer-life of Jesus? 
Here was a perfectly sinless man — tempted in all 
points like as we are, apart from indwelling sin — 
the Son of God, incarnate as Mary's son, walking the 
pathway of dependence as we must here, never help- 
ing Himself by His own almightiness, casting Himself 
in absolute human dependence upon the sustaining 
power and guiding wisdom of His father in heaven. 
It is an inevitable sequence of taking the place of 
dependence before God. If I am self-confident, if 
I have a kind of spiritual arrogance and believe 
that I am sufficient unto myself, I shall not pray 
much ; that is one thing that cuts the nerve of prayer ; 
and another is that benumbing doubt as to whether 
it does any good. If we want to see the life of 
prayer exemplified we turn to the earth-life of the 
Lord Jesus. We read that when some crisis of 
His life was coming he continued all night in prayer 



120 IN MANY PULPITS 

to God. And remember, it was praying; it was real 
praying, all night. He was praying when He was 
transfigured. Why is not transformation into the 
likeness of Christ more rapidly progressing in us? 
We do not pray enough. 

"And as he prayed the fashion of his countenance was 
altered," — Luke q:2q 

My friends, if our faces were turned upward more I 
am persuaded there would be on them some of that 
shining glory that the face of Moses caught when he 
was on the mount with God. How much Jesus 
prayed! He prayed in Gethsemane, He prayed at 
Calvary — prayer was His vital breath. Prayer is 
"the Christian's vital breath." We can have no 
strong life without prayer, and the more prayer the 
stronger the life. 

"Lord, teach us to pray," — Luke 11:1 

You see, there was the sense of need even in that 
petition. The trouble with us is that we think we 
could pray if we would; if we only had a mind to 
pray; if we only determined to pray. But no, we 
need to be taught to pray. Let us get down out of 
our self-satisfaction, and our experience, and our 
spiritual pride and confess that we do not even know 
how to pray. Then let us enter the school of Christ 
and I am sure He will teach us some precious lessons. 
How does He begin to teach us to pray? 

"When ye pray, say, Our Father" — Luke 11:2 






WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 121 

That is Jesus Christ's philosophy of prayer. The 
Christian is not an orphan. Goldwin Smith said that 
the worst consequence of atheism was to leave man 
orphaned in a vast vortex of blind force. How true 
that is! Every one of us who stops to think, feels 
that his life is played in upon by mysterious forces — 
waves and billows of influence that arise outside him- 
self and come from he knows not where. Possibly 
some wicked ancestor lives in him, and all the tur- 
bulence of a life which was lived centuries ago is 
reproduced in him today. Let us then learn this first 
lesson in Christ's school of prayer; it is that prayer is 
asking a Father for something. He bases prayer on 
relationship and prayer is just going to the Father 
with a child's need. See how he dwells upon this: 

"If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will 
he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish 
give him a serpent? 

Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? 
If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts 
unto your children; how much more shall your heavenly 
Father" — Luke 11:11-13 

That is the true and whole philosophy of prayer. 
But how many inadequate and foolish philosophies 
there are! One tells us that God is a God of law; 
another that He has enacted certain great laws of 
nature which govern the condition of human life in 
His universe, and if we learn those laws and live 
in accordance with them, we shall then live 
happy lives. That is true, of course. But Christ's 



122 IN MANY PULPITS 

answer is that God is something more than a decree 
maker, something more than the Creator and Ruler 
of the universe. Over and above all that is the 
fatherhood of God. He says in effect, "This Father 
of yours does not make decrees and laws, but He is a 
Father, and His fatherhood dominates His decree 
making." God is first of all a Father. 

Secondly, Christ gave His disciples a model of 
prayer. And what does the model teach us? That 
true prayer is worshipful: 

"Hallowed be thy name." — Luke 11:2 

I say "Our Father," and then I remember that it is 
"Our Father which art in heaven," — Luke 11:2 

The God of all creation. Our Father, but God. 
"Hallowed be thy name." — Luke 11:2 

The model puts God first: 

"Thy kingdom come." — Luke 11:2 

And I say, "Lord, here is this desire of my heart, 
which maybe I have asked in ignorance ; if it is not, 
after all, the right thing, if it comes in the way of 
the kingdom, then answer, 'no.' The kingdom first." 
And then what we need presented briefly. Prayer 
brings us right into that presence. I am in temptation, 
I need help. I am in danger, I need succor. I am 
in weakness, I need strength. My business is in 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 123 

difficulties and seems to be going wrong, and I need 
my Father's wisdom in my business. And so with 
any need — whatever it may be. That is the teach- 
ing of this model prayer. First, worship. God 
tranquilizes our souls in the presence of our Father. 
Then the coming kingdom. If the coming of that 
kingdom means that He has got to say "No" to me 
this day, well, then, still I must pray, 

"Thy kingdom come." — Luke 11:2 

and then my need: "Meet it, Lord!" That is 
the essential teaching of the Lord's Prayer. 

Lastly, does not our Lord teach us that prayer 
should be largely intercessory? How gently He 
teaches! He tells us this parable about the man 
who goes to his friend and tells him of the need of 
his other friend who is on a journey. 

"And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, 
and shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, 
Friend, lend me three loaves; 

For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and 
I have nothing to set before him? 

And he from within shall answer and say, Trouble me 
not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me 
in bed ; I cannot rise and give thee. 
I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, 
because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity 
he will rise and give him as many as he needeth." 

— Luke 11:5-8 

Pray for others. Andrew Murray has a phrase: 
"Trust for yourself, Pray for others." Do you sup- 



124 IN MANY PULPITS 

pose that when Christ prayed all night He was going 
over His own case with His heavenly Father? I 
think He may have spent two hours on Peter and 
half an hour on John, and so on. I think He was 
praying for Israel. I think He was praying for the 
whole round world. Intercessory prayer! And the 
blessed simplicity of it all ! A friend of yours comes 
to you and needs something that you have not, and 
you go to your Father and get it for him. Pray. 
Pray. That is what our Lord, in effect, says, "Pray." 
Get a need on your heart and then go to your Father 
about it. That is prayer. Stay with Him until you 
have an answer. 

"And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek 
and ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. 
For every one that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh 
findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." 

— Luke ii :p, 10 

That is prayer. 



WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR? 



WHO IS MY NEIGHBOR? 



"But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who 
is my neighbor?" — Luke 10:29 

A LAWYER, a teacher of Biblical law, one whose 
office it was to read and expound the Scriptures 
to the people, stood up to question Jesus. He 
addressed him respectfully, calling him "Master," 
but he was not a sincere inquirer, for we are told that 
his question was intended to "tempt" the Lord. 
Either this lawyer supposed that he could worst Jesus 
in an argument, or he hoped to 

"catch him in his words" — Mark 12:13 

to draw out of Him some expression which might 
be turned against Him with the people. But what- 
ever his motive, his question was certainly one of 
tremendous importance: 

"Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" 

— Luke 10:25 

The question classifies the man. He was a legalist, 
a man who conceives of eternal life as an inheritance 
— something to be received at some future time, as 
the fitting reward of the good, never dreaming that 

127 



128 IN MANY PULPITS 

it is God's free and immediate gift to the hopelessly 
bad. He was a type of millions who, after twenty 
centuries, do not yet understand the gospel. Christ, 
taking him upon his own ground of doing, puts 
before him God's only standard — the law. 

"What is written in the law? How readest thou?" 

— Luke 10:26 

The question thus turned upon himself, the teacher 
of the law answers in the words of Scripture: 

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all 
thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself." — Luke 10:27 

From the point of view of salvation by goodness, 
this answer is perfect, and Jesus commends it: 

"Thou hast answered right!" — Luke 10:28 

But Jesus did not stop there. Men are not saved, 
even under grace, by right answers to questions. The 
scribes could tell the wise men where the Messiah 
should be born, but their own feet never trod one 
step of the road that led from Jerusalem down to the 
humble manger at Bethlehem. An orthodox creed, 
desirable as it is to have creeds orthodox, never 
saved a soul. We may believe implicitly every word 
of the soundest confession of faith ever written, and 
be lost. But no soul ever trusted the Lord Jesus 
Christ, though ever so feebly, and was lost. Christ 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 129 

therefore adds one short sentence to his commenda- 
tion of the lawyer's reply. A very little addition it 
is, but it seems to produce a profound effect: 

"This do, and thou shalt live." — Luke 10:28 

Law is something to be done, not talked about. If 
a soul seeks salvation by good works, the works must 
be performed. And this is why the law can only con- 
demn; for, besides Jesus, no man ever kept the law. 
It is manifest that the lawyer felt the force of 
Christ's quiet words, for his next question betrayed 
his uneasiness. He completely abandoned the com- 
mand about loving God with all his heart , soul, 
strength and mind, and was seriously doubtful 
whether he had loved his neighbor as himself. Had he 
been as anxious for his neighbor's health and temporal 
prosperity and good name as for his own? Certainly 
not, and yet this was the standard of the law. And 
this must be a love of deeds, not merely of words, nor 
of sentiment. He must have labored as diligently 
to clothe and feed his needy neighbor and to educate 
his neighbor's children and provide him and them 
with rational and innocent pleasures as to procure 
these things for himself and his own. Two roads 
now lay open before him. He might fall at Jesus' 
feet confessing his sinfulness and plead for mercy, or 
he might attempt to justify himself. He chose the 
latter, making the fatal mistake of leaving God 
out of his scheme. 

"But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And 
who is my neighbour? 



130 IN MANY PULPITS 

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down 
from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which 
stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him and de- 
parted, leaving him half dead. 

And by chance there came down a certain priest that 
way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other 
side. 

And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came 
and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where 
he was : and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 
And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in 
oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought 
him to an inn, and took care of him. 
And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two 
pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take 
care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I 
come again, I will repay thee." — Luke 1CH2Q-35 

What words! They are nineteen hundred years old 
now, but custom has never staled their sweetness. 
They strike a note never before heard in ethics — 
the note of universality; of the solidarity of hu- 
manity. What a picture to unroll to this proud, 
self-satisfied moralist! He had imagined that his 
neighbors were his wife and children, his dependent 
relatives, his associates in business, his employer and 
social friends. The "neighborhood" to him had been 
his own immediate environment. He had been hon- 
est, generous and kindly; scrupulous in the discharge 
of every obligation, a constant and zealous attendant 
upon his own synagogue services; conscientious in 
the performance of all the observances of respectable, 
moral, well-dressed, well-to-do religionists. He had 
what he conceived to be a righteous hatred of all 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 131 

Samaritans, a prosperous man's contempt for all 
shiftless, improvident people, and a moral, law- 
abiding man's contempt for "sinners," — criminals. 
These had been his ideas. But he looked down the 
Jericho road and saw a nameless wretch, stripped of 
his clothing, lying by the wayside in a half-dying 
state. Farther along the road he saw the receding 
back of a priest whom he venerated, and of a Levite 
whom he respected. Evidently they had considered 
that the man by the side of the road had no claims 
upon them. And then he saw a hated Samaritan, 
kneeling by the side, and with his own hands minister- 
ing to the needs of the bleeding victim of the thieves, 
and upon his own beast carrying him to a place of rest 
and security. 

I do not know that it was so, but I feel sure there 
was a pause, perhaps a long one, after the last words 
of that parable. The lawyer saw what was com- 
ing. This, then, was the answer to his question: 

"Whd is my neighbour?" — Luke io:2Q 

Jesus meant to say that the bleeding wretch down 
there among the jagged rocks and under the hot sun 
of the cursed Jericho road, was " his neighbour." The 
man was not his relation, he was not a member of 
his synagogue, was not even of the same race. He 
might be a very bad man, he might have brought 
on his misfortunes by his own carelessness or im- 
providence. It did not appear that the Samaritan 
inquired into these things, even. This also was clear 



132 IN MANY PULPITS 

to the lawyer: The Jericho road did not end at 
Jericho ; it passed the frontier of Judea, it went into 
all the world. And by the side of it lay all the help- 
less, all the suffering, all the ignorant, all the de- 
graded, all the vile. That awful Jericho road ran 
in front of every leper's hut, of every criminal's 
dungeon, every orphan's cheerless home. By its side 
he saw the drunkard and the harlot, and it did not 
matter that the drunkard might be a king, or the 
harlot a queen. The Jericho road was lined with 
palaces as well as hovels. Wherever in this world 
sin had brought shame or suffering or sorrow, there 
ran the Jericho road. 

And the meaning of this Galilean was, that all 
of these sufferers were his "neighbors." If that 
were so, then the meaning of the law must be that he, 
if he expected to win heaven on the ground of merit 
— of doing — must love all these miserables ! He must 
feel toward each sufferer precisely as he would feel 
toward himself, if in like case? Precisely. That 
is the law. And an instant's reflection convinces 
that it must be so. For God loves them all — loves 
them so unutterably that 

"he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth 
in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." 

— John 3:16 

If I demand entrance to heaven on the ground of 
character, it must be heavenly character. To love 
God with our whole soul, and to love our neighbor 
as ourselves, are requirements most obviously right- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 133 

eous, for God is entirely lovable, and our neighbors 
are at least as lovable as ourselves. But who can 
stand the test? And lest there should be any doubt 
in that lawyer's mind, or in ours, Jesus put one last 
question : 

" Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour 
unto hirn that fell among the thieves? 
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him." 

— Luke 10:36, $7 

It was the one answer possible. 

It is no part of my purpose to enter into the detail 
of the symbolism of this beautiful parable. Let 
us look, rather, at the great outstanding fact. Jesus 
is the Good Samaritan. The law tells man what he 
ought to do, but can not give him power to do it. 
It shows him what he ought to be, and by contrast, 
what he is not. The priest could have presented 
an offering for the man by the wayside, if only the 
man could have gone up to Jerusalem. But he was 
half dead and could not stir. There is no remedy 
in the Mosaic economy for a bleeding, helpless wretch 
by the wayside. Neither can the law make the 
priests love that wretch. Each of us is the man that 
fell among thieves; we all travel the Jericho road, 
and the nameless Samaritan, bending over us with the 
oil of healing and the wine of joy, brings us grace, 
not law. 

And in this grace, see three wonderful elements. 
First, God's grace in Christ Jesus comes to the sinner 
where he is. We have not to ascend into heaven to 



134 IN MANY PULPITS 

bring Christ down; He is here to seek and to save 
us, and He comes all the way. The sinner has not 
even to lift himself upon his elbow. Nay, he has not 
to lift so much as his eyes to heaven. The Lord 
Jesus Christ comes; He comes to the self-righteous 
Pharisee in the pew and the drunkard in the gutter, 
— Christ, with tender compassion, bends over him 
just there in the mire where he is. Second, God's 
grace in Christ Jesus ministers salvation to the sin- 
ner just as he is. If he has faith to turn from his 
sins and to receive salvation as a free gift, the Good 
Samaritan, bending so patiently over him, will impart 
eternal life, through the new birth, at once. And this 
Good Samaritan, Christ Jesus, keeps those whom He 
saves. The Samaritan sets men upon his own beast. 
Just as the shepherd in the parable, when he finds 
the sheep that was lost, does not drive it to the fold 
with blows, nor even lead it thither, but 

"layeth it on his shoulders," — Luke 15:5 

so does God's grace in Christ Jesus finish the cure 
it begins. Even at the inn, the Good Samaritan pays 
all the charge. 



THE GOD OF JACOB 



THE GOD OF JACOB 

"Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob" — Psalms 146:5 

"Moreover he said, I am ... the God of Jacob." 

— Exodus 3:6 

LET us consider, first of all, the tremendous 
significance of the fact that such a Being as 
Jehovah will call himself the God of Jacob. We 
know who Jacob was. He was the grandson of 
Abraham. We know more than that; we know 
what Jacob was. Jacob was a crafty, grasping and 
unscrupulous man, a man of the world; a man with 
an intense desire for the things of the world; and a 
peculiarly ignoble and base man in his method of 
attaining his desires ; as we should say, a thoroughly 
dishonorable man. He was a man, therefore, for 
whom, naturally and rightly, we have feelings only 
of reprobation and condemnation. 

Instinctively, we make excuses for those sins and 
faults of character which spring out of impulse, and 
have their occasion in a passing momentary tempta- 
tion. We are acquainted with ourselves well enough, 
at least, to know that we also are compassed with 
infirmity, and that we too are constantly falling 
before the power of temptation. Therefore, when 

137 



138 IN MANY PULPITS 

we hear of some man who has fallen into sin as the 
result of some sudden assailment of temptation, 
which finds him weak because unwatchful, there 
arises in our hearts — if they are noble hearts 
— a feeling of compassion and pity. We are quite 
prepared to take our place by his side for a moment, 
and to confess that we too, under like circumstances, 
might have fallen as he fell. 

But for another kind of character we have scant 
pity. There is a cold, calculating, crafty, base, 
avaricious, grasping, subterranean type of character 
for which we feel an aversion — a settled aversion 
and dislike — without the thought of pity. We do 
not go very far in our experience of character before 
we find out, that while the outbreaking sinner, of 
strong passions and weak power of resistance, may 
be won — perhaps easily — by the engine of love to 
better things, the cold, crafty, scheming character 
is one almost impossible to move towards anything 
high and noble. Now Jacob was all of this. He 
mingled it with his faith. There was in him an ele- 
ment of faith, genuine so far as it went, which en- 
abled him to lay hold of a promise of God, but with 
it there was also this other thing, which led him to 
seek the attainment of the thing promised by un- 
scrupulous and unworthy means. That was Jacob. 
A typical mean man, yet God calls Himself 

"the God of Jacob." — Exodus 3:6 

Now think of God. How shall we speak of Him? 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 139 

He is absolutely holy — a holiness that makes sin 
hateful to Him, so that sin is the one thing that He 
(perfect love) hates with a perfect hatred. And 
this is what it comes to, this text of ours. It links 
together absolute perfection, untainted and untaint- 
able holiness, and the meanest natural character de- 
scribed in all the Bible — Jacob. Almighty God takes 
his stand as it were, by the side of that mean scamp, 
and says to all the world — and not at all apologet- 
ically — "I am his God," 

"I am . . . the God of Jacob." — Exodus 3:6 

I have no doubt that Abraham would have been 
ashamed of that grandson of his. Though not by 
any means a perfect character himself, there was in 
Abraham a largeness, nobility and breadth of char- 
acter, that would have made the grasping meanness 
and unscrupulousness of his grandson peculiarly hate- 
ful and distasteful to him. We may believe, it 
would have been with no little shame that Abraham 
would have said: "Yes, he is my grandson." But 
Almighty God, without apology and without shame, 
says: "I am his God." 

"I am . . . the God of Jacob." — Exodus 3:6 

Now I ask you — you believers, who like Jacob 
have true faith, like Jacob have grievous faults — to 
look with me for a little time at this thought of the 
revelation of the Holy Jehovah as one who takes up 
the Jacobs of this world and avouches Himself to be 



140 IN MANY PULPITS 

their God; gets alongside of them and does not dis- 
own them; stands between them and the doom they 
deserve, and transforms and glorifies them. First of 
all, consider what a hope it opens to a world full 
of sinners. 

"I am . . . the God of Jacob." — Exodus 3:6 

Ah! then the most discouraged may say: "There may 
be room in God's heart for me!' It is true, we may 
turn this another way. Some may say: "I thank 
you for nothing, — I am no Jacob. Jacob went in by 
the window always when the door was wide open. 
I do not; I go in by the door, never by the window." 
Well, all honor to them. It is commendable in them. 
But if they are not Jacobs, they are some other kind 
of sinners. They, like all of us, need a God, who will 
come down perhaps a little this side of Jacob. 

So there is in this thing a mighty hope. Why 
cannot sinners get hold of it? Cannot they realize 
that this God against whom we all have sinned and 
who cannot possibly approve perhaps by far the 
greater part of that which makes up the history of 
our lives, has come down in the person of Jesus 
Christ and said before the universe, "I, the God of 
Jacob, am your God: My blood atones for your sins; 
My shield covers you." 

"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?" 

— Romans 8:33 

Do you not see the point of encouragement? If we 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 141 

really want a sinner's God, we have Him in the 
God of Jacob. The difficulty comes in just there. 
How we do shrink from having this 

"sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in 
ourselves," — // Corinthians i:g 

Oh, how we would like to get up a little higher and 
lay hold of the God of Daniel, or of Abraham, or the 
God of Paul, but not the God of Jacob! Beloved, 
as sinners it is Jacob's God we need, the God who let 
down the ladder to rascally Jacob as he, fugitive 
from justice, lay dreaming at Bethel. 

Now, singularly enough, this way God has of tak- 
ing up with all sorts of low company is exceedingly 
offensive to a great many goodish people. They don't 
like it; they want Him to be more respectable. One 
great objection to the reception of Jesus Christ when 
here upon earth, the charge made against Him by 
the respectable people, was that He associated with 
exceedingly low-down people : 

"This man receiveth sinners," — Luke 15:2 

Bad enough indeed, but there was something worse: 

"and eateth with them." — Luke 15:2 

I can well imagine with what a snap that would come 
from the mouth of a Pharisee. "Certainly," he 
would say, "he is a very compassionate being, and 
perhaps we could get over his tender way with re- 



142 IN MANY PULPITS 

pentant, believing sinners, but he goes beyond the 
bounds of reasonable sympathy and actually eats 
with them." 

The other day, in the city of Toronto, I saw in a 
window a picture, underneath which were the words: 
"The Doctor." It was a simple picture, but it moved 
me deeply. It represented the interior of a poor 
dwelling — a mere hut. Upon a tumbled pallet-bed 
lay a sick child. By the side of the bed sat the 
doctor with a strong, thoughtful, intellectual face, 
his eyes fixed earnestly and benevolently upon the 
fevered child. I stood a long time by that window 
and looked at that picture. I had a good many 
thoughts — the scene stirred me. I thought, of 
course, upon the very surface of it, what a noble pro- 
fession is that of medicine. I thought what a grand 
and knightly thing it is, that this man, schooled in all 
that may be known of the human body and of the 
remedies with which God has strewn this earth for 
the healing of that body, should be so interested in 
that poor sick child. There was nothing in that 
room the doctor wanted. There was no money there 
for him — there was no comfort there for him. No, 
but that which was writing deep lines of thought 
upon his noble face was the suffering of that child — 
the child that was nothing to him, except as its 
racked little body was full of pain. That pain cried 
out to the doctor, cried out to the physician in him, 
and he was there with all the resources of his skill 
and of his great informed brain, the servant of that 
little heap of anguish. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 143 

Did that doctor, or does any doctor, approve of 
the pain which he sees in suffering humanity? Does 
he make light of it or condone it? Why, he hates 
it. His very business is to banish it and bring back 
vigor and health to the frame again. He is happy 
once more when he has triumphed over the disease 
and put it away. The whole glory of his knight- 
hood comes in just there. 

Then my thoughts went away to God — to the 
God of Jacob. When I see Almighty God come down 
to the side of a scheming scamp like that man Jacob 
and say to the whole universe: "Hands off! this is 
my man. I am his God" — I know it is the very 
wrong in him that stirs the God-heart and brings 
Him down there. He cannot bear not to be there 
because the poor man, though such a scamp, trusts 
Him. He must get by his side. The divine compul- 
sion of love brings God there to say in the face of all 
the little Pharisees on earth: "Yes. I am his God," 
and He gets hold of that scamp remedially. 

Let us realize this : it is our guilt, it is our moral 
disease that brings Jacob's God down here savingly, 
by the blood of the cross — helpfully, remedially. 
Have you ever thought that a physician comes to 
have a far deeper interest in sick people than in those 
who are in health? It is true. I have often thought 
of my own doctor in this city. I meet him many 
times when I am in perfect health — and I never 
meet him that I do not get a brother's greeting from 
him — but let something go wrong with this body of 
mine, let a call bring him to my bedside, and he is 



144 IN MANY PULPITS 

all interested in me at once. I would not say that he 
loves me more then, but the fact that something has 
gone wrong with me stirs the physician and he is more 
interested in me than when I am in health. 

Let us not be surprised then, dear friends, when 
we find the Lord Jesus saying: 

"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." 

— Luke 5:32 

It is just His way of saying: "Stand aside, good, 
correct people who feel no need of me — let me get 
to these Jacobs and Rahabs and Peters and Pauls 
who do need me." That is the God of Jacob. Are we 
not now ready to see what David means when he 
says: 

" Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob" — Psalms 146:5 

There is nothing more intensely interesting in Scrip- 
ture than God's dealing with that man Jacob. Take 
up your Bibles and go through the history of Jacob 
with that clew, that God is dealing with him rem- 
edially; that He has avouched Himself to be that 
man's God because the man has laid hold on Him by 
faith, although it may be a very imperfect faith. You 
will find that dealing to fall into three parts. First 
of all, God lets Jacob learn by bitter experience, the 
deep truth of the words: 

"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." 

— Galatians 6:/ 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 145 

Think of the trouble Jacob had! Years afterwards, 
when he was right with God, he said in the presence 
of a heathen king: 

"few and evil have the days of the years of my life been," 

— Genesis 47 :g 

God taught that scheming man that all his craft and 
skill would bring him deeper and deeper into sorrow, 
and Jacob had to drink the cup his own hands had 
mixed. It was one trick bringing him into trouble 
and another one plunging him deeper into it, until 
God at last intervenes. There had been enough of 
that remedy and God orders him back to Bethel. 
Then He began to touch Jacob's heart by mighty 
deliverances, and at last they two came together in 
one final wrestle and God was too strong for him, 
and the man in darkness, feeling at last his utter 
weakness, exclaims, clinging to God: 

"I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." 

— Genesis 32:26 

And then Jacob hears those words of such infinite 
meaning: 

"Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for 
as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and 
hast prevailed." — Genesis 32:28 

And presently we see him who was aforetime an 
ignoble trickster, now a patriarch, and at peace with 
God, stand before the mighty Rameses and bless him. 



146 IN MANY PULPITS 

Friends, with this clew, the whole Bible becomes 
a clinic! Every diversity of defect comes into view 
and is cured. Look at God's dealing with self- 
righteous Job, and how, purified by his suffering, 
Job comes out into the place where he too can bless 
others. I like to think of God's dealing with Peter, 
who was so impulsive and rash and headstrong and 
full of self-confidence. Do you remember the first 
interview that Jesus had with Peter? He said: 

"Thou art Simon the son of Jona; thou shalt be called 
Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone." — John 1:42 

"I take you now, a poor lump of flesh, full of im- 
pulse, partly good and partly evil, but when I have 
done with you, Peter, you shall be a rock man and 
not a lump of flesh." And so He takes Paul — "the 
tiger of the Sanhedrin" — and makes him the writer 
of the 13th Chapter of I Corinthians, the apothe- 
osis of love. Dear friends, God does not approve 
bad characters in His children. 

Lastly, we shall miss very much of this thought 
of Jehovah as the God of Jacob, if we forget that 
another stood before Jacob in the line of privilege. 
That was Esau. But God is never called "the God 
of Esau." In all the outlines of natural character, 
Esau was a kindlier and nobler man than Jacob. 
What was the difference? How does it happen that 
God is never called the God of Esau, but is called 
the God of the meaner brother, Jacob? Because 
Esau despised his birthright. He preferred the 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 147 

satisfaction of a passing appetite to that other thing 
which seemed desirable, but so far off. Esau sold 
his opportunity for a mess of pottage, and Jacob, 
who, mean as he was, believed in the birthright and 
the God of the birthright, bought it. Jacob, "sup- 
planter" as he was, trusted and believed. Esau, a 
better man, distrusted and disbelieved. 

My friends, how is it with you? Have you the 
God of Jacob, who takes up sinners as they are, 
saves them where they are, and then transforms the 
Jacobs into Israels? Is this God of Jacob who at 
last brings us into perfect conformity to the perfect 
One — your God? If He is, I congratulate you. 
Poor creature as I am, I felicitate myself that Jacob's 
God is my God. But if He is not your God, will you 
not have Him on even terms with Jacob? Will you 
not have Him just by faith? 

"Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob." — Psalms 146:5 



SONG OR ECHO— WHICH? 









SONG OR ECHO — WHICH? 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of 
me?" — John 18:34 

PONTIUS PILATE, in many respects one of 
the most interesting men of human history, has 
just asked Jesus Christ a question. 

"Art thou the King of the Jews?" — John 18:33 
The text is Christ's answer: 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee 
of me?" — John 18:34 

"Did the question come out of your soul, or out of 
your mouth? Have you caught up the phrase, 'King 
of the Jews/ from the man in the street, or are you 
really wondering who may be the rightful occupant 
of a throne of which you know yourself to be a 
mere usurper? Above all, are you prepared to form 
real convictions, and to act on them at any cost? 
Is this a song, 

"Hosanna to the Son of David:" — Matthew 21 :g 

which is struggling for utterance, or are you a mere 
echo man?" 

151 



152 IN MANY PULPITS 

Something like this I think was in our Lord's mind. 
Jesus Christ has no answer for academic questions. 
When the disciples asked Him, 

"Lord, are there few that be saved?" — Luke 13:23 

He answered, 

"Strive to enter in at the strait gate." — Luke 13:24 

A great many men are interested in purely curious or 
speculative questions in the sphere of religion who 
have scant interest in the "strait gate." Christ is 
interested in the gate, and in persuading men to enter 
it. It is this insistence of Christ on the actual, the 
ascertainable, the essential, which has always at- 
tracted strong, virile, authentic souls. He is no phil- 
osopher with a theory, no attitudinizer with a pretty 
ceremonial, but the Truth and the Light. 

And there is nothing so pitiless as light. It will 
have the facts. Afterward mercy comes, but facts 
first. Mercy is not a divine expedient which ignores 
or affects not to see the slum, but destroys and then 
rebuilds it; mercy takes note of the miasma and 
then drains the swamp. When Pilate asked his care- 
less hearsay questions, Christ was on His way to a 
very real cross, and had no mind for mere word- 
play and phrase-mongering. That cross, within an 
hour, was to become the central fact in the history 
of the world ; from it was to date a new ethic, a new 
glory on human life, a new-born measure of love, and 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 153 

by it every soul thereafter born into this world must 
at last be judged. It was no time for unrealities 
and empty phrases. The cause of Christ in the 
world today is weakened because His church — by 
which word I always mean the whole body of be- 
lievers on the Lord Jesus Christ, and not a sect or 
denomination — has turned aside to give elaborate 
answers to all kinds of speculative questions, and so 
to create and maintain a hearsay and traditional 
faith. 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee 
of me?" — John 18:34 

I want to press Christ's question first of all upon 
my unbelieving readers. Do not imagine that all of 
the traditional, hearsay, second-hand thinking on reli- 
gious matters is to be found amongst church members. 
On the contrary. The last thirty years have been 
terrible for hearsay Christians. The very founda- 
tions have been searched. From the side of science, 
from the side of historical investigation, from the 
side of the new method of literary analysis, from the 
side of philosophical speculation, everything most 
venerable has been challenged. The old apologetics, 
the old cosmogony, have been tested. The storms 
have beaten upon the Bible and have not spared one 
sacred head. It has been a time when God has per- 
mitted the shaking of all the traditional things, that 
the things which can not be shaken might remain. 

But how is it in the sphere, not of faith, but of 



154 IN MANY PULPITS 

doubt? You are not a Christian, you say, because 
you have doubts. You call them "honest" doubts. 
About the Bible, about hell, about the true condi- 
tions of salvation you have "honest" doubts. Now 
in all truth: 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee 
of me?" — John 18:34 

Did it come out of your own agony of striving to 
find a way out of sin into victory, out of unrest into 
peace? Or did you get it from the writings of an in- 
fidel like Robert Ingersoll? You think there are 
contradictions in the Bible. Did you ever find any? 
When you did find something which presented a 
difficulty did you honestly seek help from some one 
whom you believed to be expert in such matters, 
as you did with your other difficulties? Are you 
satisfied to go on through life in that way, passing on 
second hand sneers at everything that is venerable? 
There has not been uttered a new argument against 
Christ in 1,700 years. 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee 
of me?" — John 18:34 

But our Lord's question should narrowly search 
those of us who suppose ourselves to be Christians. 
Do we say this thing of ourselves, or because an- 
other said it before us? Christianity is a religion in 
which faith is alone the condition of life. Mani- 
festly, therefore, the possession of faith is the all-im- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 155 

portant matter. How much of that which we say we 
believe do we really believe? I am not speaking now 
to conscious hypocrites, men who have put on a 
cloak of profession for a reason. I think there are 
very few conscious hypocrites in human life, either 
in or out of the churches. The point is that just as 
an unbeliever may take his doubt from the lips of 
another, so we may easily live in a second-hand, 
hearsay faith. 

Against this danger Christ uttered His most solemn 
warnings. 

"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter 
into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will 
of my Father which is in heaven. 

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we 
not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast 
out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful 
works? 

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you:" 

— Matthew 7:21-23 

How much would our creed lose in bulk, if we 
honestly eliminated the articles concerning which we 
have no real convictions? How much would it be 
diminished if we submitted it to the test of perform- 
ance? We have all heard the story of the little 
girl who told the visiting minister that her mother, 
lately come to that place, had her religion in her 
trunk. Christ, so far as I have read his words, does 
not contemplate filling heaven with people whose 
religion is in their trunks. 



156 IN MANY PULPITS 

There can be no more salutary thing than for a 
Christian to ask himself the great epochal question of 
Christ's, 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself?" — John 18:34 

Now, happily, faith in Jesus Christ, because it is 
trust in a person and not in a form of words, is a 
matter of personal consciousness. I know whether I 
am trusting Christ or not. I may think small things 
of my faith, and wish it bulked larger, but the real 
point is, not what I think of my faith, but what I 
think of Jesus Christ. Do I really trust to Him my 
whole case before God? Do I really trust Him to 
work transformingly in my life? Have I ever really 
had a transaction with Him about my sins? These 
are vital questions, and every man may answer them 
quietly, reverently, in his own soul. One who can 
say "yes" to these questions is on the foundation, 
and the construction of a vital creed will not be 
difficult. A Christian finds no difficulty in believing 
whatever Christ believed, because He believed it; 
and whatever He taught, because He taught it, and 
whatever His apostles taught, because He sent them 
and authenticated them. 

"Sayest thou this thing of thyself?" — John 18:34 

There is another place in the Christian life where 
hearsay works havoc. It is the place of profession, of 
the spoken word, of personal testimony. And the 
havoc is wrought, not to the souls of bystanders, 
half so much as to the soul of the utterer. No more 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 157 

lethal habit can find place in the Christian life than 
the habit of passing on the pious platitudes and cur- 
rent phrases, which, on the lips of the first utterer, 
stood for deep spiritual verities. 

Henry Drummond gave a definition of cant which 
is among the very few of his sayings that I would 
willingly see live. He said: "There is a young man's 
experience, and there is an old woman's experience; 
when a young man talks like an old woman, that is 
cant." And of the many odious and detestable 
things on this earth, cant, religious cant, is the most 
odious and detestable. 

It seems a pity to say it, but the hymnology of 
the church is the occasion of more insincere speech 
than all other occasions combined. Hymns were, for 
the most part, written by men and women who were 
most saintly souls, and they express the highest as- 
pirations, and the very deepest devotedness. When 
we are really attuned to those lofty strains of praise 
and consecration, they are inexpressibly uplifting and 
helpful. But to sing, while gazing curiously about in 
a church, is to desecrate the holiest protestations. 
Of late years there has come into use the expression, 
"the simple life." The old meaning of the word 
"simple" is "undesigning, artless, sincere." Thus 
used, it exactly expresses the kind of Christians 
Jesus Christ wishes us to be. But despite this sim- 
plicity we must be strong in our convictions — not 
reeds 

"shaken with the wind/' — Matthew 11:7 



158 IN MANY PULPITS 

nor easily led away by deceitful sophistry — 

"enticing words of man's wisdom/' — / Corinthians 2:4 

Let us "say things of ourselves" — 

"Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the 
spirit which is of God ; that we might know the things that 
are freely given to us of God." — / Corinthians 2:12 

and 

"Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through 
our Lord Jesus Christ." — / Corinthians 15:57 



DID JESUS RISE? 



DID JESUS RISE? 

" This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses." 

— Acts 2:32 



NO one can read with attention the last chapters 
of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles or the 
Epistles, without a profound conviction that the res- 
urrection of Jesus Christ was to the first witnesses 
to Christianity, a fact in which they had an un- 
doubted belief, a joyous and triumphant confidence. 
Was that belief grounded upon adequate testimony? 
Were those men constrained to it by irresistible and 
overwhelming evidence, or were they deceived by 
supposed visions and unverified "materializations"? 

One of the greatest of the Chief Justices of Eng- 
land, himself a professed deist, said: "The resur- 
rection of Jesus Christ rests upon a basis of testimony 
greater and more indisputable than sustains any 
other fact of ancient history." Let us review that 
body of proof. It has been preserved to us in every 
essential. 

We should note, first of all, that the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ was announced in the prophecies of 
the Old Testament concerning the coming of the 

161 



162 IN MANY PULPITS 

Messiah. The 16th Psalm is quoted in the second 
chapter of Acts: 26, 27 as applying to Christ. 

"My flesh also shall rest in hope. 
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt 
thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption." 

— Psalms 16:9, 10 



Indeed, the Jewish people had always interpreted it 
of Messiah, nor could it apply to any other. 

Furthermore, Christ Himself had repeatedly fore- 
told His own resurrection. He had fearlessly 
staked the authority of His gospel, and the authen- 
ticity of His claims to the faith and obedience of 
the world, upon His physical resurrection. 

"Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. 
Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple 
in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? 
But he spake of the temple of his body." 

— John 2:19-21 

This was made one of the grounds of Christ's ac- 
cusation before the Sanhedrin. More than once, 
without the use of inference, He had explicitly an- 
nounced His resurrection. 



'From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his 
disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer 
many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, 
and be killed and be raised again the third day." 

— Matthew 16:21 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 163 

"For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the 
whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days 
and three nights in the heart of the earth." 

— Matthew 12:40 

"Then he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, 
Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, . . . " — Luke 18:31 

"And they shall scourge him and put him to death: and 
the third day he shall rise again." — Luke 18:33 

But prediction is not proof of the fact predicted, 
and we turn to the proof of the resurrection of 
Jesus Christ. It was attested by many witnesses 
and their testimony meets the most exacting demands 
of the law of evidence. 

The witnesses knew Him personally. They were 
His most intimate friends. They knew His stature, 
the color of His eyes, the tones of His voice. One 
of them, Mary of Magdala, incredulous as to the 
fact of Jesus rising again, and who did not in the 
dimness of her tears recognize Him by His general 
appearance, knew Him at once when He spoke. 
Three of the witnesses, Peter, James and John, were 
with Jesus in all the crises of His life after they 
became His disciples. It was therefore impossible 
that they could have been deceived. If Jesus did 
not rise, they deliberately fabricated the report that 
He had. 

But that theory falls to the ground the moment we 
consider two collateral facts: they were the holiest 
of men of whom the world bears any record; they 
lost all that men hold dear — country, the religion of 



164 IN MANY PULPITS 

their fathers; they incurred a relentless persecution 
which brought them into ceaseless suffering and at 
last to cruel deaths. They could not have been de- 
ceived, and they attested to the sincerity of their 
convictions by their sufferings and by martyrdom. 

These men were incredulous and hard to convince. 
Perhaps the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ 
never met a more inveterate skepticism than just 
there, in the circle of the apostles and first believers. 
The artless narrative discloses that incredulity with 
an almost childish naivete. The women who went 
to the tomb, so far from expecting a resurrection, 
were considering how they might roll away the stone 
which made secure the body of Christ. The angelic 
appearance frightened without convincing them. 
When they told what they had seen to the apostles 
and other disciples, 

"their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they be- 
lieved them not." — Luke 24:11 

When Jesus appeared in the midst of the disciples, 
they were terrified and affrighted and supposed that 
they had seen a spirit. Even after He had shown 
them His hands and His feet, and offered His body to 
a tactual examination, they 

"believed not for joy, and wondered;" — Luke 24:41 

until He actually ate before them. Each reappear- 
ance was marked by similar evidences of unbelief. 
It seems as if nothing could overcome their incre- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 165 

dulity. Thomas would not believe on the testimony 
of the other disciples, but demanded and received 
such evidences of his Lord's bodily resurrection as 
brought him to his knees in the adoring exclamation: 

"My Lord and my God." — John 20:28 

The witnesses were numerous. It is of course con- 
ceivable that ignorant fishermen, even though be- 
longing to the least superstitious of all the peoples of 
the earth, might have been the victims of an hallu- 
cination ; but it is inconceivable that so many men of 
that non-superstitious race could have been so de- 
ceived. The hypothesis that they were, makes a 
greater demand on faith than the fact of the resur- 
rection itself. 

Paul sums up the matter, in this aspect of it: 

"He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: 
After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren 
at once ; of whom the greater part remain unto this pres- 
ent, but some are fallen asleep. 

After that, he was seen of James; then of all the 
apostles. 
And last of all he was seen of me also." 

— / Corinthians 15:5-8 

The tests, as has already been suggested, were such 
as to exclude the possibility of deception. Jesus 
talked with His friends; He ate before them; they 
handled Him, in proof that He was a body of flesh 
and bones — not a phantasm or so-called "materi- 
alization," in a garden outside His tomb, in an upper 



166 IN MANY PULPITS 

chamber before the whole discipleship, on a moun- 
tain side, in Galilee, by a lake on the shore of which 
He had Himself prepared for His disciples a break- 
fast of fishes broiled on living coals — these are the 
tests. To attempt to account for them on the theory 
of phantasm is an insult, not alone to the intelli- 
gence of the witnesses, but to our own intelligence. 
Any theory which makes a greater demand upon 
credulity than the fact sought to be proved, is, ipso 
facto, to be rejected. 

These witnesses, His closest friends, men of the 
highest character, numerous, themselves incredulous, 
were furnished with tests which put out of court the 
theory of deception or phantasm. 

If their conviction of the truth of the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ had rested on a single appearance, 
there might be left in the candid mind a residue of 
doubt, notwithstanding the great number of the wit- 
nesses who have testified. But when to all this over- 
whelming body of proof it is added that the appear- 
ances of the risen Lord were numerous, it is hard to 
see how a candid mind can still hold a rational doubt. 
It is evident that by sheer dint of frequency, if in no 
other way, the incredulity with which the disciples 
at first received the fact of the resurrection, had 
wholly disappeared. After the first excitement had 
subsided, giving way to a sober faith in an evident 
fact, Christ continued with His friends for forty 
days, 

"speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of 
God:" — Acts 1:3 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 167 

How complete the certainty of His resurrection 
had become, is evidenced not only by the clear ring 
of their testimony after His departure, but by the 
composure of their fellowship with Christ during the 
forty days. 

"To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by 
many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and 
speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God: 
And, being assembled together with them, commanded 
them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but 
wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye 
have heard of me. 

For John truly baptized with water, but ye shall be 
baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence." 

— Acts 1:3-5 

"But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is 
come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both 
in Jerusalem, and in all Judea; and in Samaria and 
unto the uttermost part of the earth. 
And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, 
he was taken up: and a cloud received him out of their 
sight." — Acts 1:8, g 

The witnesses to the fact of the resurrection testi- 
fied at once and publicly. If they had kept silence 
concerning it, only committing their evidence to 
writing, which writing was not allowed to see the 
light till that generation had passed from the sphere 
of life, then, indeed, we might doubt proof so clouded 
with suspicion. But these holy men gave their testi- 
mony with the utmost simplicity. 

"We are his witnesses of these things;" — Acts 5:32 



168 IN MANY PULPITS 

said Peter in the presence of a great multitude in 
Jerusalem, where all those things were done, and 
that within fifty days of the event. All of the men 
and women concerned in the tremendous drama of 
the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ were 
still living and were there. That was the time and 
place to disprove the fact of the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. If it had been done, Christianity as a reli- 
gion would have passed into the Jewish acta sanc- 
torum. But that disproof was never offered. The 
only answer to the triumphant proclamation of the 
resurrection was persecution — the invariable answer 
of bigotry and superstition. 

It remains to note the tremendous evidential value 
of the conversion of the apostle Paul. By any 
standard, Paul was the most considerable man of his 
age. All the other personages of that time have 
passed into an obscurity which would be absolute 
were not some of them remembered because of some 
immense infamy, or because for a moment they 
crossed the path of Paul. He alone stands out, — the 
supreme man of his day. Great in intellect, great in 
scope of vision, great in moral eminence, he was also 
one of the most highly trained men of his or any 
other time. 

And that man, a contemporary of Christ and of 
the witnesses to Christ's resurrection, a foremost 
opponent of them and of the gospel, was convinced 
by first hand proof — offered by living men — that 
Jesus rose from the dead. No ingenuity or sophistry 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 169 

can set aside that fact. To believe in the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ becomes therefore a rational act. 
Paul asks: 

"Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, 
that God should raise the dead?" — Acts 26:8 

And what it is rational to believe, it is irrational to 
doubt or disbelieve. 

Other and confirmatory proof abounds. The very 
presence in history of the Christian church from the 
apostolic time proves the truth of the resurrection. 
Nothing is clearer than that the first disciples had 
given it all up. But God had, as Peter says: 

"Begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ from the dead" — / Peter 1:3 

Yes, the Christ 

"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the 
tree" — / Peter 2:24 

did rise again. 

"Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen;" 

— Mark 16:6 

and that fact establishes the authority of His gospel 
and compels candid hearts to bow at His feet. For 
by His resurrection Christ overcame death and 
opened for us the gate to everlasting life. 

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy 
victory?" — / Corinthians 15:55 



THE BIBLE 



THE BIBLE 

BEYOND all question Christianity, whether as a 
salvation or as a system of faith and morals, 
is inseparable from the Bible. From the very be- 
ginning of our Lord's public ministry in the synagogue 
at Nazareth this place of the authority of the Holy 
Scriptures was assumed as fundamental to the Chris- 
tian religion. 

I do not know that the Christian doctrine of the 
Bible is anywhere more compactly expressed than in 
the words of Paul: 

"All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profit- 
able for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruc- 
tion in righteousness, 

That the man of God may be perfect, throughly fur- 
nished unto all good works." — // Timothy 3:16, 17 

Christianity does not hold an abstract theory about 
the Bible, but rather a living and working faith in it 
as an instrument in the divine purpose, for the accom- 
plishment of great and blessed results in salvation, 
life, and service. There is no such thing in all the 
Bible as an abstract doctrine, — something which is 
to be held head-wise and not heart-wise, as a mere 
matter of opinion and controversy, instead of action 

173 



174 IN MANY PULPITS 

and life. These are great and serious demands. We 
are living our one only earthly life, and we cannot af- 
ford to be the victims of mere tradition or of a mere 
philosophy. We are glad and confident, therefore, 
that the great facts — historical and verifiable facts 
— which form the substance of the Christian faith, 
and out of which its doctrines grow, were not trans- 
acted in a corner. Submitting to the authority of the 
Bible, we are not unable to give a reason for the hope 
that is in us. 

Now, as briefly as may be in a subject of this kind, 
I am going to state the grounds upon which we be- 
lievers hold to the divine origin and authority of the 
Bible. If the book is God's book, it is authoritive, and 
we may proceed to develop its teachings with the as- 
surance that God is back of them ; that they are rev- 
elations of His will and wisdom — hence, to be im- 
plicitly received and believed and obeyed. 

I. The first of these in the Biblical order is the 
Bible account of the origin of the material universe, 
and that affirmation, simple, sublime, and perfectly 
adequate, is that God made it, 

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" 

— Genesis i : i 

and the majestic story proceeds without ever falling 
below the sublime keynote which opens it. This cos- 
mogony, or account of the origin of the universe, is 
absolutely unique. It is not merely the best of many 
other like theories, but it stands alone. There is none 
other like it in any respect whatever. The cosmogo- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 175 

nies of even the most intellectual of the races, Greeks^ 
Hindoos, Chinese, are childish and inadequate in 
comparison with this. In India, the theory that the 
earth rests upon an elephant, and he upon a tor- 
toise, is not a child's story to amuse the infant mind. 
The Bible cosmogony was written by one whose edu- 
cation and environment we know all about. That 
education was entirely Egyptian, but there is noth- 
ing in the least like this cosmogony in all the records 
of the thought and learning of Egypt. The Genesis 
story of creation came by revelation. Either this, 
or Moses invented it, and that is a more unbelievable 
proposition than that it came from God, because 
the development of the human mind proceeds in an 
orderly way, step by step, and while a great genius 
may take many of those steps and go far in advance 
of those who have gone before him, he moves out in 
the same direction nevertheless. He may be ac- 
counted for. Previous to his time, thought and in- 
vestigation had broken the soil and planted the seed 
which blossomed into fullness when the great man 
appeared. There had been Scottish legend writers 
before Sir Walter Scott; wandering minstrels before 
Homer; play-writers before Shakespeare; sculptors 
before Phidias; evolutionists before Darwin. But 
there was nothing back of Moses which pointed in 
his direction, — absolutely nothing. 

Now, that cosmogony must be accounted for: there 
it is in the Bible. But there is no way of accounting 
for it other than the Christian way, namely, that 
Moses received it by revelation from God. 



176 IN MANY PULPITS 

II. The Bible contains a continuous history of 
events occurring during four thousand and more years 
of time. 

Canon Farrar has said — and the statement stands 
without disproof today — that "in all that history, 
there has never been pointed out one clear and de- 
monstrable error." That, my dear friends, is not 
true of any other history in any other book. I know 
that every now and then — with great flourish of 
trumpets — an announcement is made that an error 
has been found in the historical part of the Bible. 
For example, some time ago, it was announced con- 
fidently that the Bible account of Nimrod was an his- 
torical absurdity. That was the precise statement 
made by Professor Driver of Oxford. "The Bible 
history of Nimrod, said he, "is an historical ab- 
surdity." Now Professor Driver was a very famous 
man, and in certain quarters where scholarship, so- 
called, ranks above "thus saith the Lord" — there 
was great consternation. You know there are always 
people — preachers, too — who are frightened by 
every assault which is made upon the Bible if it comes 
from a man with a goodly number of capital letters 
attached to his name. If he is a D.D. and an LL.D. 
-F.R.S. and says there is an error in the Bible, 
they are ready to concede it. Now, since Professor 
Driver was delivered of this Nimrod dictum, Professor 
Sayce, also of Oxford, has gone down into the near 
neighborhood of the Nimrod country, and has written 
from Assouan in these words, "I have found Nimrod 
in the cuneiform inscriptions. His full name was Nagi 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 177 

Murada, the Kassu, and he was the Babylonian con- 
temporary of the father of the Assyrian king who 
restored Nineveh and founded Calah about fifty years 
before the Exodus. So Moses was right after all." 

Professor Driver confidently announced, as being 
himself the highest authority, that the story of Nim- 
rod was an historical absurdity; but the first expert 
who went down into that country and began to dig 
found an inscription which told the story of Nimrod 
and confirms Moses. The last fifty years have been 
notable for the frequency with which the spade has 
confirmed Moses. The "Christian" remarked upon 
this last confirmation, that it might be just as well, as 
Moses has always proven to be right, to assume that 
he is right, when seeming error is reported. At the 
present moment, unbelief is asserting that the Baby- 
lonian records contain something which might have 
been suggestive of the Ten Commandments; but 
place side by side the Babylonian creeds and this 
great utterance of God and you perceive contrast, not 
similarity. Now where does this book, alone among 
all human histories, get this unique infallibility? I 
submit that the most reasonable answer is that it is 
derived from an infallible God. 

III. The Bible contains a code of ethics absolutely 
unique among human writings — the Ten Command- 
ments. 

After centuries of human thought about duty to- 
ward God and man, that law remains the only perfect 
code ever written — no one questions that. Now 
where did Moses get that law? This Moses must 



178 IN MANY PULPITS 

have been a very wonderful man, if out of his own 
mind he wrote not only the only accurate and ade- 
quate cosmogony, and the only absolutely truthful 
and reliable history ever penned, but also the only 
perfect code of ethics known to man. Did he get all 
this out of his Egyptian learning? Now, in the provi- 
dence of God, Egyptian learning was carved in im- 
perishable granite, or kept for modern discovery in 
sarcophagi and tombs. In our day that literature 
has been recovered letter by letter, and there is not 
in all the Egyptian wisdom one trace of the Ten Com- 
mandments. Where did Moses get that law? Our 
explanation is that he got it from God. He says 
God gave him these words, and we believe it. Could 
that code be duplicated out of the lore of any of the 
other races, we would be forced to the conclusion either 
that God had made independent revelations here and 
there, or that all writings claiming to record revela- 
tions from God were, after all, but the product of 
transcendent human ability. But there is nothing 
like it anywhere else — nothing. It stands alone. 
Still less can any Babylonian writing be thought of. 

The mark of God upon it is its solitariness and its 
perfection. Man never makes a perfect thing. 
Through the microscope the finest needle looks like 
a jagged crowbar, but under the microscope a bee's 
sting looks as finished and perfect as when viewed 
by the eye alone. 

IV. We believe the Bible because it contains a 
doctrine of sin and retribution which commends it- 
self alike to the reason and the conscience. In this 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 179 

respect also, the Bible stands alone. All false reli- 
gions connect sin with failure in some ritual observ- 
ance. The Bible rests its doctrine of sin upon the 
eternal principles of right and wrong; and when 
those principles are stated in the moral law, con- 
science answers: "Amen, that is right. I ought to 
have no other God before Thee; I ought not make 
to myself a graven image and fall down and worship 
it." And so on down through the great ten words 
from Mt. Sinai, the conscience answers "Amen" to 
every one of them. The doctrine of the Bible con- 
cerning sin and the consequences of sin, commends 
itself to reason, and no other system ever produced 
among men concerning sin and its consequences, 
does commend itself to reason or to conscience. 

Were I to go to a Hindoo or a Mohammedan and 
say that I felt myself a sinner before God, what would 
he tell me? He would tell me to make a pilgrimage 
to a certain shrine, to say so many prayers, to whirl 
until I fell unconscious to the ground, to fast, and to 
perform all kinds of outward observances. But could 
I feel that there was anything in such actions which 
would in any adequate way meet the demands of 
God's justice? No one could feel it. But turn to 
that old, old Bible. You will find a doctrine of sin, 
of retribution and of redemption, which perfectly 
satisfies heart and mind. We can say nothing against 
it. We may refuse it, but we cannot belittle it, and 
no rational being does. Now, where, three thousand 
years ago, did the men of the Bible get this doctrine? 
They got it from God. 



180 IN MANY PULPITS 

V. The Bible contains hundreds of prophetic 
utterances. These prophecies were given so long be- 
fore the events toward which they pointed had trans- 
pired, it is impossible to say the coming event was 
near enough to cast its shadow before and suggest 
the prophecy itself. Sometimes there is a gathering 
of portents in the political sky, or in international 
affairs; we often see premonitions of coming eco- 
nomic storms, social upheaval and the like, and we 
predict that in a few years there will be hard times, 
or a revolution, or a change in party domination. 
We are not prophets because we predict these things: 
we see the signs of them. We reason from things 
which are occurring and predict others, which are 
their natural consequences. But if you turn to the 
prophecies of the Bible, you find they anticipate 
events by hundreds and sometimes by thousands of 
years. They speak of things when there is no sign of 
them, when on the other hand every sign seems to 
make them impossible, yet these ancient prophecies in 
the slow rolling of the years have received in hundreds 
of cases a literal and exact fulfillment. 

Another thing: These prophecies are so minute 
and specific they exclude the theory that some occur- 
rence in the history of the world, resembling some- 
what the thing predicted, has been assumed to be a 
fulfillment. They are so specific, so minute, that 
when we find a fulfillment which answers to the 
prophecy made hundreds of years before, just as the 
printed page answers to the type, we are compelled to 
ask: "How does this happen?" Now, why is it that 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 181 

these things are found in no other book but the 
Bible? There can be but one answer — because God 
gave these prophecies as the authentication and proof 
that this book was not the work of man but came 
from Himself. 

VI. We believe the Scriptures because they paint 
a picture of God Himself, majestic, perfect in the 
balancing of His attributes, — yet withal so holy, so 
loving, that when the character of God as developed 
in the Bible comes to be perceived by candid human 
minds, they are filled with trustful adoration; and 
realizing that God hates sin with a perfect hatred 
and that they themselves are sinners, they yet feel 
that by some strange paradox God is the best friend 
a sinner can have. 

If you turn to the account which all false reli- 
gions give of their gods, you realize how utterly im- 
possible it is to compare them with Jehovah and 
Jesus. 

All these gods of false religions are bestial and 
cruel: deified lusts. And when I say this, I am not 
speaking of the gods of the heathen of Africa but 
of the cultured heathen of Athens and the Ganges. 
Just at the summit of their intellectual development, 
these races form a conception of deity which is sim- 
ply man in his worst character, pluralized and lifted 
up into the potency of gods. But all the time, the 
Hebrew penmen unfold the revelation of a God who 
is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, filling all 
things yet transcending all things; so great, the 
clouds are the dust of his feet, yet merciful and 



182 IN MANY PULPITS 

patient, loving and tender. This doctrine of God is 
consistently one, straight through Scripture. The 
Bible was more than two thousand years in the mak- 
ing; many writers in many ages were employed upon 
it; yet the Biblical doctrine of God is developed 
without fracture or inconsistency. Moses' God is 
Isaiah's, and Isaiah's God is the God of Paul. Can 
any theory but that of inspiration account for this? 
Where did these writers of ancient time, these 
prophets, get an identical conception of God? They 
got it from God. 

The influence of this book has been just as unique 
as everything else about it. The better Moham- 
medan or Hindoo a man is, the worse he is. But the 
nearer a man comes to being a Bible Christian the 
better he is. We all know that; and of all the books 
produced by man and called sacred and religious, 
this is true alone of the Bible. 

VII. The Bible meets exactly every human need. 
Had I an intricate-looking key and there were before 
me a long row of doors fitted with locks and I tried 
my key in one and another of the keyholes until I 
found that the key turned freely and unlocked one 
door, I would know I had found the lock for which 
the key was made. 

Friends, this blessed old Bible fits every ward of 
the complex human heart. It holds the combination 
of this intricate and mysterious thing which we call 
man. Open the Bible, and you may find out more 
about yourself than you could find by self-study 
during all the years of the longest life. It tells the 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 183 

truth about humanity; it gives infallible and right- 
eous guidance through life, and it meets the question- 
ings of your soul as you stand upon the verge of life 
and ask, — "Is this all? Have I nothing at last but 
the memory of a pilgrimage of temptations and trials 
and disappointments with a few fleeting and transi- 
tory joys? Have I the power to project my mind 
over into the beyond, and is there no beyond?" 

To all these questions, the false religions have no 
answer. But come to the Bible and there is the open 
door into heaven or the open door into hell. This 
book is not antiquated; it fits the modern heart 
just as truly as it fitted the hearts of patriarchs on 
the plains of Mesopotamia. There is not today a 
book so modern: open it anywhere and it tells the 
modern man all about himself. In all the develop- 
ment of civilization, there has never come to lie in the 
pathway of man a temptation which the Bible does 
not anticipate, and for which it does not provide a 
safeguard. There has never come to any man a con- 
dition for which that Bible has not a promise, yet 
modern society is complex and highly organized, 
while the Bible was chiefly written by men living 
under the simple and changeless circumstances of the 
east. 

We have to account for these things and we account 
for them by saying that God gave the book, and that 
is simpler and more credible than any other theory 
which has been suggested for these phenomena. 

VIII. Then we believe it because it has found its 
echo in human experience. 



184 IN MANY PULPITS 

We come to the Bible and we find there the story 
of salvation and we believe it and enter into peace 
and unspeakable joy. We come to the promises of 
that book and find them adapted to our need. We 
receive them and step out upon them and plead them 
in prayer to God, and the answer comes according to 
the promise. In the experience of the wisest and best 
and saintliest men and women this earth has ever 
seen, the Bible has verified itself and they know it 
to be inspired, not alone by such reasons as I have 
feebly attempted to give, but by a direct and per- 
sonal experience of its truth. We believe it, because 
followed faithfully and believed sincerely it has 
formed the most beneficent, the saintliest characters, 
this world has ever seen. Among all books, it alone 
has had that influence. 

I gave much of my earlier life to the study of the 
two greatest of merely human writers, Homer and 
Shakespeare, and while my understanding undoubt- 
edly profited by that study and I found keen intel- 
lectual delight in it, these books held no rebuke for 
my sins, nor any power to lift me above them. But 
when I came to the Bible and received its statements 
and received Him concerning whom, after all, the 
whole book is written, I entered into peace and joy 
and power. The Bible led me to Jesus, and Jesus 
transformed my life. 

"Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin 
against thee." — Psalms iiq:ii 

For all who have received Jesus Christ as divine 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 185 

Saviour and Lord there exists, in His testimony to the 
inspiration of Scripture, an immovable and unanswer- 
able ground of belief. Jesus knew whether the Bible 
was inspired and whether Moses wrote the Penta- 
teuch, and he confirmed it from lid to lid. As He 
took it up in His daily teachings, Jesus seemed to 
select, for special sanction, those things which most 
stagger faith. He confirmed the authority, accuracy 
and inspiration of the Bible, He who knew the writers 
and was Himself in very deed the Author of the 
Book. 



"Holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost." — // Peter 1:21 



Except as so moved, they did not speak. 

It is a human book because the Holy Ghost spake 
to men through Jesus. It is easily conceivable that 
God might have revealed all the truth contained in 
the Bible through angels; but, had He done so, 
the Bible would lack that human element which 
brings it so peculiarly close to human life in all its 
phases. Theology has so persistently put the em- 
phasis on the divineness of Scripture that its sweet 
humanness is in danger of being forgotten or ignored. 
Precisely the same mistake was made in respect of 
the doctrine of Christ's person. For centuries Prot- 
estant theology so dwelt upon His Deity, that it 
came largely to be forgotten that He was also per- 
fectly human. 

The penalties of forgetting or ignoring the human- 



186 IN MANY PULPITS 

ity of Scripture are many, but perhaps the chiefest 
of them is the tendency to make the Bible a kind of 
fetich — a sort of inferior deity, to be itself an object 
of worship. The truth is that the written Word and 
the incarnate Word have this in common, — both are 
divine and both are human. 

I ask you to think with me about its humanity. 
When Pilate brought forth Jesus and said: 

"Behold the man!" — John 19:5 

he builded wiser than he knew, for Jesus is "the 
man" — the only perfect human being the world 
ever knew since the fall. All the rest of us are, in 
measure, dehumanized by sin. In the same way, the 
Bible is the only perfectly human book. All other 
books, even the best, fail at some point of perfect 
humanity. Shakespeare has been called the "high 
priest of humanity"; but, no, Jesus Christ is the high 
priest of humanity, and the Bible unfolds him from 
God to man, through man. Then, the Bible is hu- 
man because it is given to man through man. I mean 
that, save a few reported words of angels and of God, 
every truth the Bible contains has first been wrought 
into a human consciousness. I am far from saying 
that the holy men who wrote the words of Scripture 
always understood the full purport of these words, 
but even when they did not, they were exercised 
about them. 

Paul describes the whole process of revelation when 
he tells us that the things unseen by eye, unheard by 
ear, unimagined by man, were revealed by the Holy 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 187 

Spirit, and then communicated in spirit-given words. 
And it is beautiful to see how the holy men, who 
spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, were 
usually just average men. Moses and David were 
shepherds when God called them. Elijah was a rough 
mountaineer, Amos a herdsman, Matthew, John 
and Peter were fishermen. Some one has said that 
God loves the common people. The very Son of 
God Himself was a carpenter. In its humanity, the 
Bible is the people's book, not the book of scholars 
and experts, and the people understand it. The Bible 
story is intensely human. It does not describe the 
conversations of angels, nor report their conversations 
among themselves. There are but the briefest 
glimpses of heaven. It is the book of God's interests 
in, and relations with humanity. The tremendous 
story of creation is swiftly sketched in two brief 
chapters, that the revealing Spirit may come to the 
story of a man and a woman, and their children; 
and, from Genesis to Revelation, we are always in 
human scenes, and busied with the life stories of 
other men and women and children. So resolutely 
is this so, that the heart burning to find out God, and 
what He is like, can do so only by patiently studying 
His ways with humanity. The man who turns with 
weariness or dislike from the study of man, will never 
find God. He will be like the preacher who lived up 
in the steeple to be nearer God, only to find out 
when too late that God had been down below with 
his people all the time. 

Vast bodies of revealed truth reach us only in 



188 IN MANY PULPITS 

the terms of human experience. The man has been 
made to be and to feel what he writes. The fifty-first 
Psalm, for example, is not an essay on repentance; 
it is a broken-hearted man repenting. 

"Have mercy upon me, . . . blot out my transgressions," 

— Psalms 51:1 

are his desolate cries ; but the fifty-first Psalm holds, 
nevertheless, the whole doctrine of repentance. The 
seventh chapter of Romans is not a treatise on the 
two natures of the believer, but Paul's touching 
testimony of how the Spirit-born nature and the 
Adam-born nature struggled within him, until rent 
and exhausted, he must cry, 

"O wretched man that I am!" — Romans 7:24 

In like manner, the Psalms of David are wrung out 
of his inner anguish, or sent forth from his inner tri- 
umphs like the victor shout of a king. 

Again, the Bible is the most human of books in the 
way it establishes and makes sacred human relation- 
ships. Marriage, parenthood, friendship — all sweet 
human ties find in Scripture their sanction and safe- 
guard. It is the Bible that tells of a God who has "set 
the solitary in families"; it is the Bible that tells how 
the Son of God began His great ministry by adding 
to the joy of a marriage feast; and how He was 
found in the homes of the people. Every wife, every 
child is sacred in the teachings of this humanity- 
loving book. Take away the Bible, and you remove 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 189 

from human relationships their sanctity and sanction. 
This is why when the home is rent or desolated, we 
instinctively turn to Scripture for help. 

In like manner, the Bible is the most intensely 
sympathetic of books. It reveals a God who con- 
siders our frame, that we are dust; and a Christ, who 
was in all points, save inner sin, tempted like us, and 
who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. 
We turn away instinctively from the best meant 
words of human sympathy to the infinite consolations 
of that human book. We do not wonder that the 
little imprisoned Princess dying alone in Carisbrooke 
Castle, opened her Bible and pillowed her dying head 
upon the words, 

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of 
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;" 

— Psalms 23:4 

Lastly, the Bible is the most human of books be- 
cause it reveals the essential humanity of God. Now, 
if there is a theologian reading this, he is making a 
mental note ; he is saying that I am anthropomorphic 
in my conception of God. Well, I am. That is 
a large word, but it only means "manlike." The 
Bible tells me that God made man in His own 
image, after His likeness. I think it reverent to 
infer that God accomplished His purpose, and so, 
that man — normal man, unfallen, sinless man — 
is really like God. It may be objected that the 
contention is academic and abstract because we do 
not know what unfallen, sinless man is like. But 



190 IN MANY PULPITS 

the glory of the incarnation is that it sets before 
humanity just that very glorious spectacle, an un- 
f alien, sinless man — Jesus Christ. And we are told 
that He, in His incarnation, is the brightness of God's 
glory, and the express image of His person. God, 
then, is like Christ, and Christ is like God, nay more, 
Christ is God. What is God, the unseen God, like? 
He is like Jesus of Nazareth. What is sinless, un- 
f alien man like? Like that same Jesus of Nazareth. 
The humanity of our blessed Lord was not something 
which hindered Him from revealing God, it was the 
very means of that revelation. 

Here then, my dear friends, is this most human 
book. It condemns unsparingly the sin and the sins 
which have dehumanized you. But it tells you of 
the divine-human Christ, who died for those very 
sins. It will laugh with your joy and weep with your 
sorrow. It holds the only true, because the only hu- 
man, philosophy of life. It interprets your deepest 
longing, justifies your highest aspiration, and inter- 
prets the mystery of death. Beyond death, it lifts 
the veil of eternal things, and shows you the eternal 
home. Study the Bible, believe it, cherish it, obey 
it, venerate it, love it, — it is Truth itself — God's 
book. 

"Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek 
him with the whole heart." — Psalms ng:2 



QUO VADIS? 






QUO VADIS? 

WHITHER goest thou?— The question of 
direction is everything in human life. The 
old legend has it that Peter, fleeing from martyrdom 
in Rome, having safely made his way out of the city, 
met the Lord Jesus going toward Rome. In aston- 
ishment he asked, "Quo vadis, Domine?" — "Lord, 
whither goest Thou?" "Back to Rome to be cruci- 
fied again in thy stead," was the answer; whereat 
Peter, shamed into heroism, went back to death. 

Though unhistoric, the story holds a profound 
truth. It expresses the essential distinction between 
the human and the divine theory of life. The ques- 
tion of direction — that is the vital question. Life 
is like the ladder that fleeing Jacob saw, the bottom 
of which was on earth and the top in heaven. Call 
it a stair to make it level to our modern use. It 
helps us to see that the question of direction is every- 
thing and it helps us to see also how we deceive our- 
selves. 

Two men are on that ladder of life. One is well 
up toward the top. He is clean in his life, self-dis- 
ciplined, holds a high and exacting ethical standard, 
is kindly, dutiful, reverential, a valuable asset in the 
sum of the riches of any society. But his foot rests 

193 



194 IN MANY PULPITS 

lightly on the next step below. He had not quite 
taken that step; he may easily reconsider and, turn- 
ing about, plant that foot on the next step above. 
Or, he may actually have taken the first downward 
step. He is still so well aloft that, to those below, 
that first step down passed unnoticed. He may think 
little of it himself. It is only that he has compro- 
mised with the keen edge of his best convictions. 

Men pass that fateful first compromise with scant 
notice or none. How differently the angels must 
regard it. They know that the question of direction 
is the mighty question. They are not much impressed 
by the sophisms which justified the change of direc- 
tion. It is a remark, at least as old as Bacon, that 
"There is no cause so bad that an argument may not 
be made in behalf of it." 

All the world has observed how corporations con- 
stantly do things that the stockholders as individuals 
would never do. An agent of a great league for the 
defence of what is called the "Christian Sabbath/' 
told me the most generous contributor to its funds was 
an eminent railroad man, whose railway trains ran 
steadily all day Sunday, compelling his employees to 
do the very thing he, as an individual, was paying 
an eloquent agent to persuade other workingmen not 
to do. It is easily seen that this man was an arrant 
hypocrite; what we do not see is the way in which 
we fool ourselves into base compromises. In some 
way, though higher up the ladder, we may yet have 
taken the first downward step. 

But away below us is a fellow man. He is weak 



WITH DK. C. I. SCOFIELD 195 

of will, badly born, morbid, abnormal in many ways. 
In him burn the baleful fires of inherited appetites. 
That first glass of wine, which to you was normally 
distasteful, so that you had to acquire a liking for 
it, was nectar to him. He is shifty, weakly vain, 
irresolute. But he has had a vision of Christ. In 
some poor dim sense, the eternal verities have become 
real to him. He has faced about, and though still far 
below you on the ladder on which character is de- 
veloped, and with a still imperfect sense of the ideals 
which to you are commonplaces, he is facing up and 
you are facing down. Some day you two will stand 
for a moment on the same step, and then you will 
see him no more, for your face is set downward and 
his has already caught the supernal gleams. 

Toward heaven or toward hell? This question 
of direction is the vital, the determining question. 
Lacordaire said: "We need a divine revelation to 
tell us of the divine love, but not to tell us that for 
eternal sin there must, in any moral universe, be an 
eternal hell; as for eternal love there must be an 
eternal heaven." The honest observation of life 
teaches every one of us that sin, loved and persisted 
in, ends badly here in this world. It is idle and 
irrational trifling to pretend that it can end otherwise 
in the prolongation of life elsewhere. I long ago 
ceased to argue the question of the existence of hell. 
Sin, loved, persisted in, makes hell here and now; 
makes home hell; makes the heart hell. The man 
who thinks he believes that the incident of death, 
which affects a change of place but not of nature, will 



196 IN MANY PULPITS 

reverse the eternal laws of cause and effect, has placed 
himself outside the region where profitable discus- 
sion is carried on. The essence of sin is self-will in a 
low level, regardless of the rights of God or man — 
and that is hell anywhere. 

In like manner, the fact of heaven authenti- 
cates itself in any reflecting mind. We look about 
us ; we see the godly and the good ; we observe that 
the genuinely godly are the good, — the terms are 
indistinguishable; and we notice that as much of 
heaven as we ever see here, we see in the tranquillity, 
the gentleness, the blessed helpfulness of the lives of 
the godly and the good. So much of heaven as touches 
our poor lives, touches us through them; and we 
know — with a knowledge past all power of the 
sophist to disturb — that somewhere in the vast uni- 
verse which God has made, there must be a heaven 
for the godly and the good. 

When the merely morally good claim that heaven, 
we know that there is a fatal defect in their title. 
Matthew Arnold was a man of excellent morals, 
but when he died, a gentle lady, who knew him well, 
said: "Arnold would not like God." What reason 
indeed have we for supposing that people who do not 
like God in this life, will like Him in the next? Many 
a well built ship has gone crashing upon the rocks of 
a lee shore, not because it was a bad ship, but because 
it was not headed in the right direction. 

Now in this vital matter of direction heavenward 
or hellward, God has made it possible for every hu- 
man being to know with absolute clearness whither 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 197 

he is bound. The whole question of human destiny, 
complete in its details, is one of perfect simplicity in 
its essence. Human destiny turns on one question: 

"What think ye of Christ?" — Matthew 22:42 

"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to 
become the sons of God," — John 1:12 

This is not arbitrarily so, but of necessity. I will try 
to show you this. The phenomenon of the Christ is 
explicable in but one way: 

"That God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto him- 
self," — // Corinthians 5:19 

The Godhead of Christ is the only rational explana- 
tion of His perfect sinlessness, His perfect wisdom. 
No other perfect character has ever appeared among 
men, nor have the greatest masters of the creative 
imagination ever put a perfect character into litera- 
ture. But this wonder becomes perfectly reasonable 
when we say 

"that God was in Christ." — // Corinthians 5:19 

But why should such a thing as the incarnation come 
to be? Again no other answer but the inspired one is 
conceivable : 

"God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." 

— // Corinthians 5:19 

Surely the world needs such a reconciliation, and 



198 IN MANY PULPITS 

how else could it be effected? To be reconciled to 
God it is essential that the world, which has lost the 
knowledge of God, should again see Him; and God, 
who is a Spirit, could come into the vision of men in 
no other way but by living among them a human 
life. 

And so the question of eternal direction is of neces- 
sity determined by the individual attitude towards 
Christ. The sinner humbly conscious of his unworthi- 
ness, who receives Christ as Saviour, master, friend, 
though still most imperfect, has chosen the heavenly 
things. He belongs to Christ, is in Christ's kingdom 
and under Christ's healing. His name is in the Lamb's 
book of life. He is one of the joint heirs. He is the 
Father's son. His way heavenward may be with 
many a stumble, he may even wander far, but he 
has a Shepherd who goes 

"after that which is lost, until he find it." — Luke 15:4 

And it is incontestable that the men and women 
who have met God in Jesus Christ, are — speaking 
in the large and by immense majorities — the great- 
est of all visible forces working for righteousness in 
the practical affairs of this present world. Elimi- 
nate from the influences which make for social order, 
for clean living, for sanctity of the home, for kindli- 
ness and helpfulness, the Christians of any commu- 
nity and what would remain? We will not say that 
nothing would remain. The Christian cause is fre- 
quently weakened by overstatement. Good citizens 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 199 

there are and many honest men, who are not Chris- 
tians. Alas, also, many who are professing Christians, 
and in the judgment of charity really Christians, do 
not count in the battle for the best. 

To these I would say, There are two possible 
theories of life. We may say of each day as it comes: 
"This is my own, I may do with it what I will, so 
only that I do not use it to the detriment of my 
fellow man." That is one theory of life. It is the 
usual theory. The every day lives of the millions are 
lived by it. Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of 
one of his most entertaining characters: "The world 
is my oyster." Life may be blamelessly lived by it, 
if our idea of blameless living is only not to do harm. 

But there is another theory. It says: "Life is a 
trust. Not one of these wonderful things that we 
call minutes belongs to me in the sense of exclusive 
use. I am one of millions. I am my brother's keeper 
and my brother is my keeper. I want it so, and am 
glad we are members one of another. All about me 
are human hearts less blessed, less favored than mine. 
I am a Christian, therefore I may draw from the 
divine abundance and pour it into these maimed, in- 
complete, shadowed lives about me." 

That is Christ's theory. In its deepest essence the 
other is the devil's theory. Quo Vadis? 



THE TEST OF TRUE 
SPIRITUALITY 



THE TEST OF TRUE 
SPIRITUALITY 

TWO Epistles are notable for the severity of their 
tests of Christian profession — James and I 
John. James is concerned with the reality of the 
professor's faith, John with the reality of the be- 
liever's experience, that is, of any pretensions which 
he may set up to spirituality of life. The key phrase 
of James is: "Yea, a man may say," — ; the key 
phrase of this aspect of I John is: "If we say" or 
"He that saith." Profession is easy, but false profes- 
sion is supremely dangerous. The man who is living 
in sin and unbelief, and knows it, is fairly open to 
the gospel appeal; but the man who in self-de- 
ception answers the gospel appeal by saying: "But 
I am a Christian," is in the most dangerous place 
conceivable. 

If one be a Christian, there is always the grave 
danger of living in mere positional truth on the one 
hand, or of assuming a false spirituality on the other. 
In the first case one would resemble a noble who 
should exalt his mere patent of nobility while living 
most ignobly. In the second case, one falls into the 

203 



204 IN MANY PULPITS 

snare of spiritual pride based on some supposed ex- 
perience or attainment. 

James exposes a false or mistaken profession of 
faith; John a spurious spirituality. This exposure 
John effects by seven tests applied to profession. 
Let us look at these. 

The first applies to the profession of fellowship 
with God. 

"If we say that we have fellowship with him," — / John 1:6 

The test is severe but simple. To such a profession 
he says in effect, "Where do you walk?" The "walk" 
is the daily life. Now, says John, there are two 
places and but two where a believer may walk — 
darkness and light. Light is where God is and what 
God is: 

"in him is no darkness at all." — / John 1:5 

Observe it is not how we walk, but where we walk. 
David, in the fifty-first Psalm, all broken and crushed 
with the sense of his sin, is in the very whitest of 
the light, for he is saying: 

"Have mercy upon me, O God," — Psalms 51:1 
He is saying: 

"Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me 
from my sin." — Psalms 51:2 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 205 

He is saying: 

"Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil 
in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou 
speakest, and be clear when thou judgest." — Psalms 51:4 

In the light, though, his whole talk is of his sins. 

Now see a man in darkness — a good, moral man 
too, and a believer in God: 

"The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I 
thank thee, that I am not as other men" — Luke 18:11 

That man in the very act of prayer is in thick dark- 
ness. 

To walk in the light is not to walk sinlessly, but 
it is to bring the sin instantly to God. It is not to 
serve perfectly, but it is to bring the imperfection 
to Him. It is to live the daily life in His presence. 
Now, if we say that we have fellowship with Him, and 
have two lives, a religious life for Him and a secular 
life for ourselves, we walk in darkness, and our pro- 
fession of fellowship is a lie, John says. 

John's second test strikes down at one blow the 
most subtle of the errors into which men have fallen 
concerning this most vital subject of holiness — the 
notion that by regeneration, or by "the baptism 
with the Spirit" or by the "baptism with fire," or 
some other experience, the old Adamic nature has 
been eradicated, so that such an one no longer has 
sin as an indwelling fact. As to this John's word is 
clear: 



206 IN MANY PULPITS 



"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and 
the truth is not in us." — / John 1:8 



Note carefully, John does not say that those who 
make that profession are not saved. What he says is 
they are deceived, because they are not judging 
the matter by revealed truth, but by some supposed 
experience of feeling. The underlying rule here is 
one which if duly heeded will save the child of God 
from every excess of fanaticism. It is — Judge ex- 
perience by the Word, not the Word by experience, 

"For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper 
than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing 
asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, 
and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
heart." — Hebrews 4:12 

Beloved, the old nature unchanged and unchangeable 
is within; all victory lies in the recognition of that 
fact, and then in self-distrustful resort to the pro- 
vision of grace for that fact — the indwelling Spirit. 
So long as we walk in the Spirit we do not 

"fulfil the lust of the flesh." — Galatians 5:16 

"For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit 
against the flesh; and these are contrary the one to the 
other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would." 

— Galatians 5:17 

How subversive of this constant watchfulness, how 
sure to end — as all experience shows — in humili- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 207 

ating defeat, is the notion that the flesh has been 
eradicated. 

And, as closely connected with that error, is the 
one to which John opposes his third test, the error 
of sinless perfection in the flesh. 

"If we say that we have not sinned," — / John 1:10 

Mark well, this message is to the little children of 
the Father. We have not here a word to the self- 
righteous sinner but to the presumptuous child of 
God. And it is not, " If we say that we have not 
sinned in the past "; it is a present word, a word 
for every moment of our lives. If we say right in 
the midst of our best prayer, of our purest aspiration, 
that "We have not sinned" — What? 

"We make him a liar," — / John 1:10 

Are we ready for that? Do we want to do that? 
But how can a little child of the Father possibly find 
himself in such a case? For the old reason — in- 
attention to the Word: 

"His word is not in us." — / John mo 

when we say such things. And His Word is uncom- 
promising about sins. His grace has made a way of 
forgiveness and cleansing for confessing children who 
sin, but that Word will never permit us to lower the 
standard as to what sin is. Have we forgotten that 
an offering was provided for sin? Have we forgotten 



208 IN MANY PULPITS 

that in His eyes, the very heavens are not clean? No, 
we need this humbling Word, this searching test. 

The fourth test applies to profession of a different 
kind, to the claim to intimate acquaintanceship with 
God. 

"He that saith, I know him," — / John 2:4 

Bear with a cautionary word. Knowing about God 
is one thing: knowing God is quite another. Job's 
confession illustrates this: 

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear:" 

— Job 42:5 

and upon the hearing there had come to Job a true 
faith, a faith which had withstood tremendous 
shocks. Well, we all begin there. Our saving faith 
is based on testimony. But Job goes on: 

"but now mine eye seeth thee." — Job 42:5 

A very different matter. Are we then content to 
remain with a hearsay knowledge of God? By no 
means. In the 1 7th chapter of John, our Lord tells 
us that the ultimate end of the gift of eternal life 
is that we may know Him. He is our Father, and 
can our hearts rest with anything short of that per- 
sonal knowledge of Him of which John speaks? At 
this point, John's test of spirituality is not to dis- 
courage a true knowledge of God, but to expose a 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 209 

false assumption of such knowledge. What is that 
test? 

"He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his com- 
mandments, is a liar," — / John 2:4 

Does John mean to put us back under law? Not at 
all. He speaks in his characteristic way, meaning he 
who is living outside the known will of God, and 
says "I know God," is a liar. It is not sinless obedi- 
ence, but it is a heart set to live in the known will 
of God. Such a one will have many a failure, but, 
though often stumbling, he will keep on. The needle 
in the compass is often deflected by influences about 
it — it trembles and is unquiet, but it resumes its 
steady alignment with the object of its devotion. 
Now a life aligned to the will of God, is in the way to 
know God. It is not an arbitrary requirement. In 
no other way, to no other man, can God reveal Him- 
self. Paul's prayer for the Colossians runs along 
that road: 

"That ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will 
in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; 
. . . increasing in the knowledge of God;" 

— Colossians i:g, 10 

John's fifth test of the profession of spirituality 
of life, also applies to the walk. 



"He that saith he abideth in him, ought himself also so 
to walk, even as he walked," — / John 2:6 



210 IN MANY PULPITS 

Upon a superficial view, this seems most discourag- 
ing. What is it "to abide" in Him? Many earnest 
souls have known much distress just here. They 
have been told that "to abide" in Him means to be 
always occupied with Him. Now I make bold to 
say, this is an unattainable counsel of perfection. 

We are in the world, and however sedulous we may 
be to keep the world out of us, we are charged with 
engrossing duties calling for the utmost concentra- 
tion of mind, heart and hand. We cannot be in 
conscious constant occupation with Him. I do not 
so understand that great word. 

For a moment think of that other phrase — "in 
Him." What does that mean? Ephesians explains 
it. "In Christ Jesus" is the sphere of the Christian's 
life. That is where grace has put him. We have 
not to concern ourselves about getting that place: 
we are there. Now, what is "abiding in Him?" Why, 
simply having nothing apart from Him, living in the 
sphere of the things which interest Christ; bringing 
Him into the sphere of all our necessary occupations, 
joys and innocent pleasures down here; having no 
business in which He is not senior Partner; no wed- 
ding feast or other feast at which He is not chief 
Guest, no failures which are not brought to Christ for 
forgiveness and cleansing. 

What is John's test of such a life? In degree, 
though not as perfectly, it will be a walk even as 
He walked. It will lead along the same road; it will 
encounter the same trials, enlist the same sympathies. 
Apply the test; it is easy, if humbling. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 211 

"He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is 
in darkness even until now." — / John 2:g 

God is love as surely as God is light. The light and 
the love are one. Then, how impossible to walk with 
God — for that is to walk in the light — and have 
hatred for one of the other of God's children. Re- 
member, John speaks in an absolute way of these 
things. It is not what we may call our feeling for 
our brother, "dislike" or "instinctive aversion" or 
"annoyance" — John has one name for the insincere 
evasions — hate. That is John's word. 

Think of this. Is there some brother against whom 
we have taken up a breath of accusation which we 
have whispered about to his detriment? Is there 
one whose ways annoy us so that we avoid him? Is 
there one whose habits, though within his liberty in 
Jesus: Christ, do not happen to be the habits in which 
we have been more narrowly reared and against 
which we whisper? My friends, till we are cleansed 
in the laver, till our feet have been in His blessed 
hand, let us not talk of walking in the light. So we 
come to John's final test: 

"If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a 
liar." — / John 4:20 

With John, "love" is more than sentiment, more 
than a feeling. It is a principle which moves the 
hand and opens the purse. If I am not my brother's 
keeper, if I am not, in the measure of my power, my 



212 IN MANY PULPITS 

brother's providence — wisdom for his folly, a hiding- 
place for his shame, open-handed for his need, wet- 
eyed for his sorrow, glad in his joy, — oh, then let 
me at least spare him the insincerity of my pro- 
fession, "I love God." 



SERVING CHRIST 






SERVING CHRIST 



After these things Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples 

at the sea of Tiberias ; and on this wise shewed he himself. 

There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called 

Didymus, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of 

Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. 

Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto 

him, We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered 

into a ship immediately ; and that night they caught nothing. 

But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the 

shore: but the disciples knew not that it was Jesus. 

Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? 

They answered him, No. 

And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of 

the ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now 

they were not able to draw it for the multitude of fishes. 

Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, 

It is the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was 

the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him (for he was naked) 

and did cast himself into the sea. 

And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they 

were not far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) 

dragging the net with fishes. 

As soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals 

there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. 

Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have 

now caught. 

Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of 

great fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all 

there were so many, yet was not the net broken. 

Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the 

215 



216 IN MANY PULPITS 

disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was 

the Lord. 

Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and 

fish likewise. 

This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to 

his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead. 

So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, 

son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto 

him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto 

him, Feed my lambs. 

He saith to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas, 

lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest 

that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep. 

He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, 

lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto 

him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, 

Lord, thou knowest all things ; thou knowest that I love thee. 

Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep. 

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, 

thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: 

but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy 

hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither 

thou wouldest not. 

This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify 

God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, 

Follow me. 

Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus 

loved following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, 

and said, Lord, which is he that betray eth thee? 

Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this 

man do? 

Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, 

what is that to thee? follow thou me. 

Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that 

that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He 

shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what 

is that to thee? 

This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and 

wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 217 

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the 
which, if they should be written everyone, I suppose that 
even the world itself could not contain the books that should 
be written. Amen." — John 21:1-25 

THE twenty-first chapter of John is not so much 
an epilogue of the Gospel, — although it is that, 
— as an introduction to the Book of Acts, which 
gives the essential facts concerning right Christian 
service in this dispensation. It is a chapter which 
has to do with service — service to the risen Lord, 
and with suffering as well. This once seen, we ask if 
there is any single word or phrase that will give a 
keynote to the new discipleship? I think we shall 
find it in the phrase, 

- "If I will." — John 21:22 

And I believe the words "If I will" give the key- 
note to the whole chapter considered as conditioning 
the service of the Christian to the risen Lord. The 
central condition of that service is hearty acceptance 
of the will of Christ over the service of His saints, a 
will which extends to the minutest detail of that 
service, leaving absolutely nothing to choice, incli- 
nation or self-will. 

As illustrating that service, we have in this chapter 
six wonderful pictures, each distinct, each drawn by 
the Master's hand, and each having a wonderful 
teaching. 

The first of these is a picture of service in self- 
will, and its results. It is in the first three verses. 



218 IN MANY PULPITS 

"Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing." — John 21:3 

Now, if Peter knew anything he knew he was a 
servant of the risen Lord. Already the risen Christ 
had appeared twice to his disciples. Already He had 
breathed on them and said, 

"Receive ye the Holy Ghost:" — John 20:22 

so that from that moment, those disciples were indwelt 
by the Spirit and therefore had spiritual discernment 
and were in a position to be taught the things con- 
cerning the kingdom. The Lord had been with them, 
teaching them of this higher service; He had not 
appointed any meeting like this by the lake. He had 
told them to tarry in Jerusalem, but the one thing 
that the natural man, the flesh, can not do is to keep 
quiet. We can not wait for some clear word from 
the Lord. The Master had appeared and told them 
wonderful things, and then He had disappeared again. 
As the hours went by, possibly the days, no new word 
came from the Master. Peter became restless. 
Naturally he thought of his old trade: 

"I go a fishing." — John 21:3 

Mere waiting for orders is intolerable. So he goes 
fishing. And immediately we see one result of that 
kind of activity ; we see human leadership in place of 
divine leadership. The others — perhaps the kind 
of men who are easily led, and are uncomfortable 
unless they have a leader — immediately said, 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 219 

"We also go with thee." — John 21:3 

Ah, how Christ's service is marred by strong-willed 
men ; men who will not wait for a word of direction, 
nor a suggestion from the mighty Master, but serve in 
self-will. Note the result. All of these men were 
fishermen who knew the waters of that lake perfectly, 
and they went out and fished all night but, — " caught 
nothing." 

Then very gently came the test. These things are 
always tested. In the morning the Lord is there on 
the bank. Remember, He has purchased these men 
with His blood; they have no right to any inde- 
pendent service; they ought to have changed self- 
will for His will. The Master who has bought them, 
and who is entitled to every activity of their lives, 
stands on the shore and asks, 

"Children, have ye any meat? They answered him, No." 

— John 21:5 

That is the outcome of choosing our way and place 
in service. Is not this the easy, natural, unforced 
explanation of the lack of fruitfulness in so much of 
so-called Christian activity? 

But, we say, we are not told to be successful; we 
are told only to be faithful. There is a little grain 
of truth in that, and yet I never find Jesus commend- 
ing fruitless service. I find Him saying, 

"I have chosen you and ordained you, that ye should go 



220 IN MANY PULPITS 

and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should re- 
main :" — John 15:16 



If there is no result whatever from patient and long- 
continued service, there is something wrong about it 
somewhere. God means that we shall have fruit for 
our toil. We say, "O, it is a time of seed-sowing, 
and the harvest will come after a time," and we let 
ourselves down easily and make no searching exami- 
nation into the cause of our failure. Faithfulness is 
a great virtue, but it is a greater thing to start right, 
and to be sure that we have the "I will" of the Lord 
before we undertake anything for Him. 

For our second picture we have Christ-directed 
service and its results. The moment He tells these 
fishermen, who knew all about fishing, where to cast 
the net, the net is full! I need not comment on that. 

"Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall 
find." — John 21:6 

O, the blessedness of Christ-directed service! He 
does not mean that we shall have no result from our 
prayers and our toil; and if we see no result, one 
fair presumption is, that we may be doing something 
which we have chosen to do ourselves and not some- 
thing which the Lord gave us to do. That full net is 
a wonderful picture. 

Now we come to our third picture ; — the break- 
fast by the lakeside, where the laborers and the Lord 
feast together. The legend written under this pic- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 221 

ture is: "The risen Christ supplies the needs of His 
servants." 

They had caught nothing that night, yet Jesus, 
knowing their need beforehand, with hands that had 
been pierced for them, had prepared breakfast for 
them there on the shore of the lake. It was He who 
said, 

"Come and dine." — John 21:12 

They had been serving in self-will, yet the grace of 
the Lord would not leave them breakfastless. He 
loved them. He meant to show them the right path 
of service. How I wish we could get that thoroughly 
settled as servants of the Lord — that the Lord is 
enough for all the needs of His servants. We do 
not need any source of supply, even in material 
things, beside the Lord. O, that we had faith to 
absolutely trust Him, and then leave it to Him to 
minister to our need in whatever way He pleases! 

Let us pass on to our fourth picture — our risen 
Master's colloquy with Peter. 

We cannot misread the legend beneath this picture. 
It is: "Love of Christ the only right motive." Note 
in passing an important subtitle to this picture. It 
is: "The risen Christ chooses whom He will to serve 
Him." But that is but a detail of the picture, the 
central meaning of which is that love of Himself is 
the only motive which gives to service a value in 
the eyes of the Lord. Three times our Lord asks 
Peter if he loves Him, and in answer to Peter's con- 



<m, IN MANY PULPITS 

fession that he does love Him, and that the Lord 
knows that he loves Him, the Lord thrice commissions 
Peter for service. 

"Lovest thou me? Feed my lambs." — John 21:15 
"Feed my sheep." — John 21:16, 17 

Think a little of this. We sometimes pray that we 
may have a love for souls; we even pray that we 
may have "a great burden" for souls. I have known 
young people, who are preparing for missionary work, 
to pray that they might have a great love for the peo- 
ple in Africa, or whatever the chosen field might be. 
But Peter is not asked if he loves the lambs and if 
he loves the sheep. You can see how that motive 
would break down. The question is, 

"Lovest thou me?" — John 21:16 

Then feed "my lambs/' "my sheep." And any other 
motive in service is not, with Christ, a sufficient 
motive. 

How many of us, I wonder, are serving out of mere 
denominational loyalty and zeal, or out of our deep 
interest in some organization in which we are officers 
or members? I believe there is great need for deep 
heart-searching just at this point. Is the central 
motive of our service personal love for Him? And is 
this the one test which we propose to ourselves every 
day in our service? 

And now we stand before the fifth picture. Again 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 223 

the central figures are the risen Christ and Peter. 
But now the Lord is speaking, not of Peter's service, 
but of its end in martyrdom. What is it called? 
"The risen Christ apportions suffering and death." 

I do not believe that servants of the Lord die 
accidentally. I do not believe that death "happens" 
to a child of God. 

"When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst 
whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou 
shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, 
and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.' — John 21:18 

None of us would choose suffering; none of us would 
choose a martyr's death; and yet Peter, willful as he 
was, cowardly as he had been, would yield himself 
to that. 

"This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify 
God." — John 2i:ig 

And now one last picture in this wonderful gallery: 
Service is personal. 

Peter would like to have made it, so to speak, a 
fellowship matter, a corporate matter. Seeing John, 
he said, 

"Lord, and what shall this man do?" — John 21:21 

And in effect the Lord replied, "Peter, that is none 
of your business" — 

"If I will that he tarry," — John 21:22 



224 IN MANY PULPITS 

if I will that he catch fish, if I will that he tend 
sheep and lambs, if I will that he suffer, if I will that 
he die — 

"what is that to thee? follow thou me." — John 21:22 

So with all service. We are not to take our word 
of command at second or third hand. Oh, let us get 
into right personal touch with Him! There is a 
strange, sweet liberty in this kind of service. Christ 
will choose His own servants, very strangely some- 
times, and the motive in service that is pleasing to 
Him is love for Him. Yet can we rest under all the 
trials that come, in the consciousness that our suf- 
ferings, even our very death in the path of obedience, 
are appointed for us by Him and are not accidents — 
that, like John, we are immortal until our work is 
done. 



OUT OF BONDAGE 






OUT OF BONDAGE 



"If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free 
indeed." — John 8:36 

THE most widespread and universal of the de- 
lusions current among men is the notion that 
they are free. No imputation is more quickly, more 
vehemently resented than the imputation of slavery, 
of bondage. There are no free men. Millions, thank 
God, are in the process of emancipation, but none 
are yet completely emancipated. Paul told the 
Roman chief captain that he was born free. In the 
limited sense in which he used the word it was true ; 
Paul was born a Roman citizen. But in every other 
important sense the words were not true, as Paul 
would have been the first to admit. Like all of us, 
Paul inherited chains. For centuries that mysterious 
force, heredity, had been silently, invisibly, prepar- 
ing bonds for him — bonds for spirit, soul, body. 
Every soul born into the world is born into an in- 
visible net which the centuries have been weaving 
for him. Its meshes are race predisposition, race 
habit, family habit, family sin, family religion. 

Think of the men to whom Christ was talking when 
He uttered the words of our text: 

227 



228 IN MANY PULPITS 

"We be Abraham's seed and were never in bondage to any 
man:" — John 8:33 

They spoke honestly enough, as we do when we 
boast of our freedom, but at that moment they were 
in political, intellectual and religious bondage. Polit- 
ically, they were under bondage to an assortment 
of despots from Caesar down to Herod and Pilate. 
Morally, they were the slaves of race pride, of prej- 
udice, of ignorance, of habit, of sin, of self-will. 
Religiously, they were the slaves of traditionalism, of 
bigotry, of formalism. 

Is our case better? Very slightly. Theoretically, 
we are free politically. Actually, we are the slaves 
of party, of the caucus, of the bosses and the trusts. 
The very minute I give over into the hands of a con- 
vention the right to formulate my political creed I am 
no longer absolutely free. When I allow a habit to 
dominate my life, I am no longer free. When I allow 
pride, or vanity, or ambition, or pleasure to control 
my life, I am the basest of slaves. The very fact that 
I do not, can not, cease from sin proclaims me a slave. 
Jesus Christ came into a world of slaves. 

It is interesting to note that His first formal an- 
nouncement of His mission on earth touched life at 
that very point. In the synagogue at Nazareth there 
was handed to Him the book of the Prophet Isaiah, 
and he found the place where it was written: 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 229 

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed 
me to preach . . . deliverance to the captives," 

— Luke 4:18 

Jesus Christ has, indeed, a various work in the world, 
and He touches human life at every point of hu- 
manity's need, but we single out for our meditation 
this morning Christ the Emancipator. 

He begins with our slavery to sin. Here He en- 
counters an initial difficulty. The man whom He 
would set free is not only a slave, but a condemned 
slave. He is a slave, exposed for sale, but with a 
halter around his neck. Who will redeem him? Nay, 
rather, who can redeem him? Not his brother man, 
for he, too, is a slave with a halter around his own 
neck. What is the price of this slave — of that one? 
One price for all. Whoever will redeem these slaves 
must die in their stead. And, obviously, only one who 
has never sinned, and who is himself perfectly free, 
can be accepted. Only one being has ever appeared 
who met these necessary conditions — Jesus Christ. 

And to pay that price is the very business that 
brought Jesus Christ to this earth. At the cost of 
His own life, of His own unimaginable suffering, He 
pays the last demand of a holy law and redeems 
from death the slaves of sin. Are they free? From 
the curse of the law, yes. From the habit of sin, no. 
Then begin those great redemptive processes which 
work in the sphere of the inner life, the object of 
which is the transformation of character and com- 
plete deliverance from the domination of sin. Let us 
trace the method of that deliverance. 



230 IN MANY PULPITS 

It begins with the complete removal of threat, of 
fear. The believer is told that he is not under law, 
that is, a system of probation to see if he can work 
out a righteousness for himself, but under grace, that 
is, a system of divine inworking which produces the 
very righteousness which the law required, but which 
man never achieved. The believer is assured that 
Christ has given to him eternal life, and that he 
shall never perish ; that no man is able to pluck him 
out of the omnipotent hand which holds him; that 
He who began a good work in him will perfect it 
till the day of Christ. As for his sins, they are 
blotted out, cast behind God's back, buried in the 
depths of the sea, forgiven and forgotten. And this 
is a necessary first work, for no man is really free 
who is under the bondage of fear. 

Grace imparts to the believer the indwelling Holy 
Spirit. The nature that was open to every assault 
from without, and a slave to every vile impulse from 
within, is now garrisoned by omnipotence. In the 
power of that indwelling One, the believer is made 
free from the monstrous necessity of sinning under 
which every unredeemed life groans. No Christian 
needs to sin. If he yields to solicitations from with- 
out, or the more subtle suggestions from within, it 
is because he deliberately or carelessly wills it so. 
The Spirit is there to break the power of sin. 

Grace puts the renewed life under the stimulus 
and inspiration of great relationships. The believer 
is not merely a pardoned criminal, he is a child and 
son of God; and that by a new birth which is as 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 231 

actual in the sphere of the spiritual, as his natural 
birth was in the sphere of the physical. He is a son 
of God, not by some far-off fact of creation, but by 
the immediate and personal fact of a divine begetting. 
He no longer traces his descent from God through 
Adam, but is, as Adam was, a son of God with no 
intervening ancestor. This, the believer is told, brings 
him into the wonderful privileges of access to the 
Father, and of fellowship with Him. Christ is not 
ashamed to call him 

"brother," — Matthew 12:50 

he is raised to joint heirship with Christ in all things, 
and is to share the power and glory of Christ in the 
coming kingdom. 

Grace confers upon the believer the great office of 
priest and king. As priest, he is set free from the 
ancient formalism in the worship of God 

"to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus," 

— Hebrews 10: ig 

and offering, without regard to time or place, 

"spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." 

— / Peter 2:5 

His worship, freed from ceremonialism, is a son's 
adoration of a Father who is infinite in holiness and 
benevolence and power, but who is none the less a 
Father because He is God. And this office of priest 



232 IN MANY PULPITS 

carries of necessity the privilege of intercession. The 
believer-priest prays for those outside the family of 
God who do not pray for themselves. He is the 
"daysman" and "remembrancer" before his Father. 
Grace tells the believer that he is as vitally united 
to Christ as the members of his own body are united 
to him. 

"For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body," 

— / Corinthians 12:13 

"He that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit." 

— / Corinthians 6:17 

And this gives him the only right conception of 
what true liberty really is. It is not anarchy, which 
is the mere riot of self-will, but it is to be so joined 
to God the Father; so vitally one with Christ the 
Son; so yielding to the gentle sway of the Holy 
Spirit, that the human will is blended into the divine 
will, and so made one with the absolutely free and 
sovereign will of God Himself. God does as He wills, 
but God always wills to do that which is at once 
absolutely right and absolutely benevolent. 

In all this there is no subversion of the believer's 
individuality, but the lifting of that individuality to 
the divine level of a passionate love of all that is 
highest. It is obedience, but obedience under the 
new covenant, where the law is written in the heart, 
like mother-love. A mother finds her truest joy in 
obedience to that imperative, born into her deepest 
being with the birth of her child. No honest man 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 

feels the constraint of the laws against theft. He 
is not honest because of something printed in a 
statute book, but because of something printed on 
his heart. He would still be honest if the statute 
were repealed. Therefore, he is perfectly free. With- 
out that interior work, no external thing done to a 
man makes or can make him free. Executive 
clemency, extended to a convicted criminal, does not 
make him a free man. He is still the slave of his 
criminal desires. But if he falls in love with honesty 
and uprightness and integrity, then he is free. All 
this transformation, grace works in the redeemed 
heart. 

Then grace works transformingly by the power of 
new and exalted ideals. The whole conception of 
life is changed. Under the old bondage, life was con- 
ceived of as a possession which man might rightly 
use for himself; under the new ideal life is precious, 
because it may be used for the blessing of others. 
The new man in Christ has accepted as the new ideal 
of his new life Christ's law of sacrifice. He heartily 
adopts Christ's formulae: 

"The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to 
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." 

— Matthew 20:28 

"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whoso- 
ever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." 

— Matthew 16:25 

"Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it 
abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 

— John 12:24 



234 IN MANY PULPITS 

Such an ideal, heartily accepted, under the con- 
viction that so only may life be nobly lived, is of 
itself a complete disenthrallment from the old slavery 
to self. Pursued, though with a failure, and with 
steps which often halt, such an ideal is a transforma- 
tion. The man who accepts it, has issued to the uni- 
verse his declaration of independence. He is free 
from the old appeals and solicitations which had 
power over him because they seemed to promise 
something toward the old monstrous ministry to the 
god self. No longer desiring self-exaltation, the bribe 
has ceased to appeal. Its presentment only causes 
pain to the heart that has fallen in love with humility. 

Then grace allures and charms with the vision of 
eternal things. Paul divides all things into two cate- 
gories, things seen and things unseen. He declares 
that the seen things have the fatal defect of being 
temporary, while the unseen things have the infinite 
value of eternal endurance. 

The problem of the Christian life, therefore, is based 
upon the fact that so long as the Christian lives in 
this world he is, so to speak, two trees — the old tree 
of the flesh, and the new tree of the divine nature 
implanted by the new birth ; and the problem itself 
is, how to keep barren the old tree and to make 
fruitful the new tree. This problem is solved by 
walking in the Spirit. 

"This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil 
the lust of the flesh." — Galatiam 5:16 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 235 

The sap of the new tree is the Holy Spirit indwelling 
in the believer. 

"The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of 
water springing up into everlasting life." 

— John 4:14 

It is the truth implied in the parable of the vine 
and the branches. The vine is Christ, the branches 
are believers, and the unseen Renewer of vigor and 
growth is the Spirit. It is difficult to conceive how 
radical is the revolution in the life which is wrought 
by the simple recognition of the Spirit's indwelling. 
His presence, thus acknowledged, gives the keynote 
of the life. If some greatly honored and beloved 
friend enters our homes as a guest, the whole life 
of the home, so long as the guest remains, is keyed 
to the fact of his presence. All merely personal 
preferences are for the time subordinated to the 
known tastes and preferences of the guest. Inev- 
itably, then, the recognition of the Spirit's indwell- 
ing must be followed by loving response to His 
wishes. 

We learn, perhaps with amazement, that God the 
Spirit will take possession of no more of our lives than 
is willingly abandoned to Him. He is the divine 
courtesy, the divine delicacy, impersonated. He 
comes as Christ's personal representative, whose first 
and greatest function is to make Christ real to us; 
to actualize to us all that we have and are in Christ. 
Has Christ been to us an abstraction, a name, even 



236 IN MANY PULPITS 

though our faith in Him has been true? Then the 
Spirit will make Him the personal Christ, the present 
Christ. Has the divine Fatherhood been to us but 
a juiceless doctrine, a mere phrase? Then the Spirit 
will make that Fatherhood more real to us than that 
of an earthly parent. He will cry in our hearts, 

"Abba, Father," — M ark 14:36 

till our whole being shall respond. 

Has our prayer life been cold and formal? The 
indwelling Spirit will form within our hearts peti- 
tions that shall be fragrant with faith, and warm 
with desire. Has our worship been a thing of forms 
and times, a Sunday performance, mostly intermitted 
during the week, so that we have come to call our 
meeting house a "house of worship," forgetting the 
word of Him who said: 

"the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, 
nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father." — John 4:21 

"God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship 
him in spirit and in truth." — John 4:24 

The Spirit comes to light in our hearts the pure 
flame of adoration, wonder, love and praise — a flame 
that will make every day and every house one of 
worship. But most of all He comes to subdue and 
conquer the old self-life which has dominated us 
and brought us into captivity to the law of sin. 

We make wonderful discoveries as we go on walk- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 237 

ing in the Spirit. We come upon new and humbling 
revelations of our own evil, but along with these, 
such experiences of the sanctifying and delivering 
power of the Spirit as lead us constantly in the tri- 
umph of Jesus Christ. Believing this, the new man 
in Christ sits lightly to things seen. They become 
mere accidents of life, not its substance. Of this 
world's goods he may have much, and he is glad 
because they can be used to enrich other lives; or 
he may gather little and is glad, because he has not 
the responsibility of the right use of great posses- 
sions. His true inheritance is in heaven. There he 
has riches untold. That is his home. There, he will 
always have his great place of identity with Christ 
in the glory, a son of God to whom the very angels 
are now, and ever will be, the servants. 

"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath 
made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke 
of bondage." — Galatians 5:1 



THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS 



THE MYSTERY OF GODLINESS 



"And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness:" 

— / Timothy 3:16 

THAT is, in Christianity, which is the divine 
method for the production of godliness, or god- 
likeness, the transformation of man into the image 
of God, there are mysteries — supernatural things 
— miraculous things. And not only mysteries, but 
great mysteries, and so evidently is that true that it 
is without controversy — it is not open to question: 

"without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness:" 

— / Timothy 3:16 

The apostle immediately enumerates six of these 
mysteries, not as exhausting the number by any 
means, but as illustrating his proposition that in 
Christianity there are mysteries. 

First of all, he instances the incarnation: 

"God was manifest in the flesh," — / Timothy 3:16 

Truly here is a mystery — nay, two of them, for 

241 



242 IN MANY PULPITS 

God is a mystery and man is a mystery and the in- 
carnation combines them both. 

"justified in the Spirit," — / Timothy 3:16 

first in His baptism, and again when, by the Spirit, 
He was raised from the dead, after bearing the sin 
of His people. 

"seen of angels," — / Timothy 3:16 

Outside of the ordinary sight of man are intelligences, 
spiritual beings, angels. These are linked to this 
God man, this divine One. 

"preached unto the Gentiles," — / Timothy 3:16 

It seems a strange thing that this should be counted 
among the mysteries, and yet to one instructed in 
Old Testament truth, it is a great mystery. 

"believed on in the world," — / Timothy 3:16 

Another one of the mysteries of godliness, 

"received up into glory," — / Timothy 3:16 

— the crowning miracle of His resurrection and as- 
cension into heaven. So that just illustratively, and 
as bringing out his thought, the apostle mentions six 
of these great mysteries which stand connected with 
godliness. 

There is a tendency in our day to rest the defence 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 243 

of Christianity upon the superiority of its ethics, upon 
the moral beauty of it as a preceptive system. It 
was this fear of the miraculous, this lack of faith 
boldly to proclaim the mysteries and supernatural in 
the religion of Jesus Christ, which was the root-idea 
of a Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World's 
Fair. The thought was not that we should demon- 
strate to the adherents of the false faiths the divine 
origin of ours by means of its supernaturalism, but 
that we should demonstrate that our ethical system 
was, on the whole, superior to theirs. Beyond all 
question there is in that superiority an unanswerable 
argument. But, after all, there is nothing more super- 
natural in Christianity than its ethics. We do not 
escape the miraculous, or marvelous, or mysterious in 
Christianity by exalting the preceptive teachings of 
the Word of God, for the absolutely unique character 
of those teachings immediately raises the question of 
origin. 

Compared with this body of precept all the codes 
of all the philosophies are imperfect — not to say 
denied by obvious imperfections. Take, for instance, 
the Ten Commandments. You may rest their vindi- 
cation upon their rightness. Every one admits that 
it is right to do those things which are commanded 
and wrong to do those things which are forbidden. 
But that very perfection suggests the inquiry: 
"Whence came that law?" So, by whatever road we 
approach the subject, we get back, after all, to the 
supernatural, to the mysterious. It is an inescapable 
element of the Christian faith. 



244 IN MANY PULPITS 

Turn to the Acts of the Apostles. Trace the his- 
tory of the first putting forth of this gospel of Jesus 
Christ. You find the constant insistence upon the 
marvelous and mysterious in it as the unanswerable 
proof that it came from God. The great burden of the 
apostolic preaching was the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ. It was a recent event. The witnesses of 
His resurrection to the number of about five hundred 
were still living. The whole matter was one open 
to inquiry and susceptible of ordinary investigation. 
And the first preachers went everywhere, resting the 
authority of the gospel which they preached upon 
that stupendous miracle — the resurrection. 

But all the mysteries were preached. There was 
no apology for these things; nay, they were insisted 
upon; the weight of the argument is upon them. 
The advance and maintenance of the gospel was 
made to depend upon the supernatural in the faith, 
upon the great body of mystery which it holds. 
Everywhere the incarnation, resurrection, the second 
advent of Jesus Christ, the existence and presence 
of angels, were the every-day testimony of the 
apostolic church. They gloried in these truths, 
they were not afraid of them, and they did not apolo- 
gize for them. 

Since, then, these great mysteries inhere in the 
Christian faith, we shall do well to consider what 
they are and why they are there. 

First of all, we ought to expect it to be so. If 
God is at work for the saving of men; if the gospel 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 245 

is what the apostle Paul said it was — and he gave 
that as his reason for not being ashamed of it — 

"the power of God unto salvation to every one that 
believeth"; — Romans 1:16 

if the very essence of Christianity is that men are 
saved, not by conformity to ethical precepts, but by a 
great God-wrought work; then, just because God is 
doing it, there must be a measure of mystery in it. 
It would not be God's work if there were not mystery 
in its processes. 

God's work in creation is full of mystery. We 
do not refuse to believe the great patent and obtru- 
sive facts of creation because we are unable to ex- 
plain them. The very commonest phenomenon, that 
of life — so common that we cannot live (with our 
senses at all exercised) through one day without 
observing it again and again — whether in the tiny 
blade of grass or in the men and women about us, 
is a mystery which has never been solved. Today 
it is as great a mystery as it was in the very dawn 
of creation; no one knows anything about it except 
the fact of it. But we do not refuse to credit the 
fact, because unable to explain the process. We 
do not recoil from the material universe of God and 
refuse to believe in it because we cannot explain its 
mystery. Wherever we find God's work, we find 
the miraculous and mysterious. If God is at work, 
this is inevitable. 

Now, if this is true of God's work in creation, it 



246 IN MANY PULPITS 

must be true of God's work in redemption, and that 
simply because it is the Incomprehensible who is at 
work. Therefore when we come upon a miracle, we 
do not apologize for it, we do not retire it into the 
background of our testimony and make as little of 
it as possible, but we exult in it and proclaim it. We 
glory in the fact that this Christianity of ours presents 
mysteries which are, at present, insoluble — into the 
processes of which the mind cannot penetrate. We 
point to that as God's very sign manual and authen- 
tication of the system. If that were wanting we 
should reject the system as evidently man-made. A 
God whose being and processes I could understand, 
would be of precisely my girth and stature — no 
more. So this fact that there are mysteries in Chris- 
tianity is our boast. It is the unanswerable proof to 
our minds that God, indeed, is the Author of this 
religion. 

If we examine the natural religions — the man- 
made religions — we do not find this mystery. We 
find a vast number of fables, it is true, but we are 
easily led to see (even the enlightened votaries of 
these religions acknowledge this) that they are old 
wives' tales and mere childish traditions. 

Not so if we turn to the mysteries of the Chris- 
tian faith, for we ourselves are the subjects of them 
in large part and are seeing the effects and results 
of them every day in our own experiences. For some 
of the very profoundest of these mysteries are per- 
petually renewed, continually reenacted. Regener- 
ation, answered prayer, the hand of God in human 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 247 

affairs — these are the mysteries in which we live 
and move and have our being. It is not a question 
of historical signs and wonders merely; it is a ques- 
tion of a living experience with a living God whose 
dealings perpetually transcend the reach of our com- 
prehension. 

In the second place, in every one of these myster- 
ies there are two elements. There is the fact, which 
is always simple, historical, obvious, reasonable ; and 
there is the explanation of that fact, which eludes 
our discernment. There lies the baffling, the mystery. 
What is done is evident. How it came to be done 
is the thing we do not understand. The process is not 
explained. Therein lies the element of mystery in 
this faith of ours. 

Take for an illustration the first of the mysteries 
enumerated by Paul in our text — the incarnation. 
The Scriptures state the fact of the incarnation in 
the simplest terms: 

"God was manifest in the flesh," — / Timothy 3:16 

"The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," 

— John 1:14 

As a fact, therefore, it offers itself to human obser- 
vation and verification. So we look at Jesus — 

"manifest in the flesh" — I Timothy 3:16 

therefore human, and immediately observation con- 
firms the fact. How perfectly human, how entirely 



248 IN MANY PULPITS 

human He is! There is a birth; there is a cradle; 
there are swaddling clothes; there is a nursing 
mother; there is growth; there is the obedience of 
a child; and there is, finally, the taking up of a 
great mission- — a man goes out among his fellow 
men, weeps when they weep, rejoices when they re- 
joice, is weary like other men, and at last dies. 

Yet this man is just as evidently doing things which 
only God can do. He makes it evident that He is 
omniscient and omnipotent. He knows what is going 
on at a distance. He creates. He commands nature 
and she obeys. He heals incurable diseases and He 
raises the dead. The fact of the incarnation is 
confirmed — we see the man, and we see God. But 
— and here is the mystery — when we would go be- 
hind the fact and ask: "How can that be? How is 
it that God can be incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth?" 
we get no answer. A fact, then, is given, which is veri- 
fiable, simple, obvious, and it is the fact which is pre- 
sented for our faith, and not the process, not the 
method. 

This is true of all these mysteries. Take for an- 
other illustration, regeneration: 

"Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born 
again" — John 3:3 

Instantly we are ready with the question of Nicode- 
mus: 

"How can a man be born when he is old?" — John 3:4 
What is the answer? Is there an unveiling of that 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 249 

mysterious process by which the Spirit of God, acting 
upon the Word, imparts the divine life, — creates 
a new man within a living man? Not at all; not the 
smallest syllable of explanation of the process. What 
then are we told? 

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even 
so must the Son of man be lifted up: 
That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but 
have eternal life." — John 3:14, 15 

And then we look away to Christ crucified; we see 
Him bearing 

"our sins in his own body on the tree" — / Peter 2:24 

and we say with Paul: 

"who loved me, and gave himself for me." — Galatians 2:20 

Lo! the mystery is enacted and we are born again 
— but our senses are not quick enough to surprise 
God in the process. Here for our faith is a fact, 
Jesus hanging upon the Cross. The cross has an 
historical place: it is a fact in the world's history, — 
just as real a fact as the battle of Waterloo, — and 
that fact is presented for our belief, not the explana- 
tion of the fact. But the result of faith in the fact of 
the cross is another fact — and this too is verifiable. 
We see men full of all kinds of evil, transformed in 
life, and we see, too, that the change is first of all 
within. The changed outward life is the spontaneous, 
joyous outworking of a wholly new inner life, so that 



250 IN MANY PULPITS 

it is natural, so to speak, for these things to come 
forth. We see, then, the result. We are not taken 
into the mystery of the process. 

Take prayer, — the most familiar of the experi- 
ences of a Christian. There, also, you have a very 
simple fact, and a mystery very profound. A child 
of God lifts up his voice and heart to God. Does he 
see God? Not at all. So far as outward observation 
goes, he is talking into the air. He may not be talk- 
ing audibly at all; perhaps the anguish is too great 
to put into words and his groans ascend to the throne 
of God. Does he see God? No. But presently 
something happens and it is the very thing he asked 
for. 

Only yesterday I called upon a friend who for 
weary months has been suffering and is now facing 
a surgical operation that may be fatal, as she well 
knows. She was telling me of her experience. She 
has already undergone one exceedingly perilous and 
painful operation. Her testimony was that two 
weeks before it was to be performed she was filled 
with the torment of fear. She said with a sweet hu- 
mility "I didn't know how to pray, but I asked God to 
take that fear away, and — would you believe it, 
He did." 

So it is with the providences of life. Prosperity 
comes to one, losses to another. One pathway seems 
to be strewn with roses, another is paved with thorns. 
Why? I do not know: it is a mystery. But as I 
stand before it, baffled and perplexed, I hear the 
words of the Lord Jesus: 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 251 

"What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know 
hereafter." — John ij:? 

How strange, how inexplicable is the providence of 
death! How strange some deaths! How sorely 
puzzled I was when that young missionary, dear 
Clarence Wilbur, was taken in the morning of his 
beautiful manhood from the very forefront of the 
fight down there in dark Central America, a noble 
soldier of Jesus Christ stricken down dead! Why 
was I not taken? Why not some of us who seem to 
be doing so little for the Lord? Why should he be 
taken? I do not know. I have no solution to offer. 

I think of dear Mrs. Dillon, another missionary, 
heroine in Jesus Christ, taken from her husband, from 
her children, and from her work in that same dark 
land. 

In the mysteries of godliness, the human side is 
always simple, reasonable and right. It commends 
itself to the judgment and to the conscience and to 
the heart of man, invariably. Judgment says, it is 
wise to trust Christ; conscience affirms that it is 
right to trust Christ; the unquiet heart knows it can 
never rest until it trusts Christ. But connected with 
this simple, reasonable and right thing which man is 
to do, there is a great category of strange and mar- 
velous and unexplained things, which God will do, 
but that is God's part of it. We go stumbling over 
that which God reserves to Himself, and we are 
unable to find one single, unreasonable requirement 
— staggering, puzzling requirement — laid upon us, 



252 IN MANY PULPITS 

This, then, is what it comes to: God offers facts 
to human faith — verifiable facts, and facts for the 
truth of which, before He demands faith, He inva- 
riably offers proof. Jesus Christ said: 

"believe me for the very works' sake " — John 14:11 

abundant proof concerning that which is asked of you 
and of me — faith for that which God reserves to 
Himself. It is beautiful to see how Paul, for instance, 
and all men of faith of the Bible, humbly took this 
place. They confessed themselves to be beginners 
in the school of God. 

"For we know in part, and we prophesy in part." 

— / Corinthians 13:9 

says the great apostle. 

"For now we see through a glass, darkly;" 

— / Corinthians 13:12 

Does Paul stumble therefore? Not at all. With 
quiet assurance, he stands before this partial knowl- 
edge, this clouded mirror, and answers : 

"But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is 
in part shall be done away." — / Corinthians 13:10 

"but then shall I know even as also I am known." 

■ — / Corinthians 13:12 

Meantime he trusted that the Almighty was taking 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 253 

care of the mysteries. Is this difficult, dear friends? 
Can we not trust and patiently wait? We are in the 
kindergarten now; perhaps we could not understand 
the method of the mysteries, even if it were told us 
ever so plainly. 
Let this suffice — we shall know hereafter. 






GLORYING IN THE CROSS 



GLORYING IN THE CROSS 

"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, 
and I unto the worldi' — Galatians 6:14 

THE first part of this text has become one of 
the commonplaces of our Christian vocabulary. 
We quote it in our prayers. 

"God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." — Galatians 6:14 

Why bring God into a meaningless prayer? God has 
long ago forbidden that we should glory save in the 
cross: it is we who persist in glorying in almost every- 
thing else. 

I have heard Christians glory in fine church build- 
ings ; I have heard them glory in their denominations, 
their numbers, their wealth, their riches; and I have 
heard them glory in church choirs — especially in 
church choirs. Last summer, going to preach in a 
city church, I was received by a courteous officer who 
said: "We are congratulating ourselves on hearing 
you today, and we are congratulating you on hearing 
our choir." I heard the choir, sitting within three 
feet of them, but I could not distinguish ten words 

257 



258 IN MANY PULPITS 

of what they sang. I have heard Christians glory in 
their preacher. Now, it is right and scriptural for 
Christians to esteem faithful ministers of the Word 
for their work's sake ; that is one thing. But to boast 
in their gifts is quite another. We need to hear again 
PauPs almost contemptuous — 

"Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by 
whom ye believed." — / Corinthians 3:5 

I have heard Christians glory in the amount of money 
they gave or spent on ecclesiatical adornments; I 
have even heard them glory in church organs. 

Think what Paul might have gloried in. He might 
have gloried in his descent from Abraham, one of the 
kingliest men in history; he might have gloried in the 
long line of law-givers, prophets, priests and kings, 
whose goodness and genius shed luster on the Jewish 
nation and brought blessing to the world. He might 
have gloried in his flawless morality; in his piety; 
in his zeal; in his superbly trained powers; in his 
matchless success. But what Paul did glory in was 
the cross. 

The cross has come to be a symbol to be venerated, 
even by those who never come to saving terms with 
the Crucified. A man once went to Talleyrand and 
told him he had invented a new religion. Talleyrand 
answered: "I am a busy man: go and get yourself 
crucified for your new religion, get yourself raised 
from the dead; then come back here and I will listen 
to you." But in the year 65 of this era the cross 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 259 

was not a venerated symbol. To the man of that day 
it meant just what a gallows means to the man of this 
day. Paul, however, one of the foremost men of 
that or any other time, gloried in setting forth a cross 
as the symbol of that to which he gladly devoted his 
very life. Why? What did Paul find in the cross to 
glory in? We shall find a full answer to that question 
without going outside this very Epistle. But let us 
look first at the latter clause. Of what world is 
Paul speaking when he says: 

"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ; by whom the world is crucified 
unto me, and I unto the world." — Galatians 6:14 

One of the chief infelicities of our common version 
of the Bible is that it translates many Greek words 
by one English word, "world." Sometimes "world" 
means that part of the earth over which the Roman 
power spread its sway. Sometimes it means the 
mass of human beings on the earth. Sometimes it 
means that elaborate world-system of power, riches, 
pleasure and vanity, which seems so alluring to all of 
us, but which was organized by Satan and of which 
he is "god" and "prince." But in Paul's writings 
it often means ceremonial and external religion. A 
religion which consists of ceremonies, synagogue 
going, rites, ordinances and the like, and which ex- 
pressed itself inside the fold of Christian profession 
in Paul's time, by the demand that converts should 
be circumcised. Such religionists were a party in 
the professing church. This was the "world" to 
which Paul was crucified. The context shows this. 



260 IN MANY PULPITS 

The ceremonialists had a symbol; — the knife of 
the circumcisers. Paul had a symbol; — the cross 
of Christ. It was, needless to say, no question of what 
the ancient rite of circumcision might justly mean 
to an Israelite. PauPs sole contention was, that in 
the light of the cross, circumcision had lost all mean- 
ing. But the ceremonialists had a seeming advan- 
tage. They would say: "We are not like Paul with 
his easy 'believe and be saved' religion." They re- 
quired something arduous and difficult. And Paul's 
answer was that his gospel also required something 
so arduous and so difficult, their circumcision was 
absolutely nothing in comparison with it. That his 
gospel required the awful death of the Son of God; 
and from man a humbling that left him not even 
circumcision to glory in. 

The knife of the circumcisers has indeed long been 
sheathed, — it finds no place in modern religious dis- 
cussion; but it still stands as a symbol of works 
without faith — futile. 

So Paul had nothing of himself in which to glory, 
but nothing could hinder his glorying in the cross. 
Paul gloried in the cross, first because there the Son 
of God 

"gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from 
this present evil world" — Galatians 1:4 

In that cross Paul saw God Himself take up the 
whole question of our sins and so deal with them 
that now he could fling out his triumphant challenge 
to the universe: 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 261 

"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?" 

— Romans 8:33 

Is not that something to glory about? 

Paul gloried in the cross because he had died 
there with Christ. 

"I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live;" 

— Galatians 2:20 

The law in slaying Christ there had slain Paul. 

"For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might 
live unto God." — Galatians 2iig 

Henceforth he was become dead to the law. The 
law having slain him had exhausted its demand. 

"The law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth" 

— Romans 7:1 

but no longer. Now Paul could do what he never 
could do under the law; he could 

"live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and 
gave himself for me." — Galatians 2:20 

So he will glory in the cross that set him free. 

Paul would glory in the cross because there Christ 
had redeemed him from the curse of the law, at the 
awful cost of being made a curse for him. 



262 IN MANY PULPITS 

"Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being 
made a curse for us:" — Galatians 3:13 

He had been 

"of the works of the law" — Galatians 3:10 

and the law had cursed him; but Christ had come 
and lifted that dreadful curse from Paul, that Paul 
might be redeemed. That cross was at once the 
manifestation and the measure of the personal love 
of Christ for him, Paul — 

"Who loved me, and gave himself for me." 
— Galatians 2:20 

Here, friends, is something wonderful, and I would 
that we might all enter into it. It is even more wonder- 
ful than the cloud into which Moses entered on Sinai. 
It is that Christ in His death not only saw and loved 
us all, but He saw and loved each of us. This is 
distinctly stated by Isaiah: 

"When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he 
shall see his seed" — Isaiah 53:10 

"He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be 
satisfied: " — Isaiah 53:11 

The death pangs of Christ were the birth pangs of the 
new creation each member of which is born separately 
and redeemed separately. Of that compensatory 
vision each of us may say: "He saw me, and gave 
Himself for me." 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 

Paul glorified in the cross because by it he was 
redeemed from "under the law," that he might re- 
ceive the placing as a son. 

"To redeem them that were under the law, that we might 
receive the adoption of sons." — Galatians 4:5 

The cross did not redeem Paul from the curse of the 
law only to leave him still under that which had 
cursed him, and must continue righteously to curse 
all who are under it: 

"as many as are of the works of the law are under the 
curse" — Galatians 3:10 

Paul gloried in the cross because it made possible — 
next to deliverance from the curse — his mightiest 
blessing: the indwelling Holy Spirit. 

"And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit 
of his Son into your hearts" — Galatians 4:6 

Paul well knew that through the holy atoning blood, 
and that only, could he ever have received the 
Spirit. What a new reason for glorying in the cross. 
And finally Paul would glory in the cross because 
it made an end of things between him and the world. 

"But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified 
unto me, and I unto the world." — Galatians 6:14 

Friends, here is something searching. It is one thing 



264 IN MANY PULPITS 

to glory in the cross because by it we are become 
dead to the law; but are we as ready to exult in that 
same cross because by it we are become dead to the 
world and the world dead to us? To Paul, the cross 
stood not only between him and the wrath of God, 
but between him and this great world-system of 
ambition, greed, and pleasure. 

There is a closing word at once austere and 
difficult. 

"From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in 
my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." — Galatians 6:17 

The Greek for "marks" is "stigmata." What does 
this mean? We may not dogmatize. Two interpre- 
tations are suggested. Paul had, like his Master, 
been cruelly scourged. Doubtless his body, like 
Christ's sacred body, bore the marks of the scourge. 
In this sense the apostle bore the stigmata of Christ. 
But from earliest ages it has been believed that also 
upon Paul's flesh had been supernaturally imprinted 
the scars of the nails. There seems no room for his- 
toric doubt that St. Francis of Assisi, whom even 
Protestants have called "the Christliest man since 
Paul," also received the stigmata. It is a very, very 
sacred, a very tender subject. 

The Cross is the throne of truth. Upon it Jesus 
completed, by the shedding of His precious blood, the 
work of our redemption, through which, from being 
the children of wrath, we are become the children of 
a loving and eternal Father. And whatever, in the 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 



265 



divine will, it is given us to bear, let us not refuse it 
as did Simon the Cyrenian — let us glory in the Cross 
of Christ. 



THE HEAVENLY PATTERN 



THE HEAVENLY PATTERN 

"See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the 
pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews 8:5 

TT7E have in the book of Exodus the account of 
V V that visit which Moses paid to Jehovah Him- 
self in the excellent glory above Mount Sinai — a 
visit lasting forty days and forty nights, during which 
time Moses received from God most explicit instruc- 
tions concerning a tabernacle which he was to make 
for the particular dwelling place of Jehovah among 
his people. And not only did he receive instructions, 
as we might say, specifications, concerning the struc- 
ture of that building, but he also saw the heavenly 
things, the heavenly purpose, the great truths of 
which that building, when it should be finished, would 
be but a type, a kind of parable in gold and linen and 
brass and silver. 

In other words, Moses was invited up into the 
presence of God and into the vision of the heavenly 
things in order that he might reproduce in type the 
things which he had seen. Again and again was given 
to him the solemn exhortation: 

"See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the 
pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews 8:5 

269 



270 IN MANY PULPITS 

Nothing, absolutely nothing was left to Moses' 
originality or initiative. A perfect plan was given 
to him and the most elaborate and detailed instruc- 
tions as to execution of the plan, and his responsi- 
bility began and ended with strict and implicit obedi- 
ence to the instructions which he had received. And 
my purpose is to try and draw from that event, to 
which our text refers, its central and permanent truth, 
— that Moses was commissioned to build something 
on earth that should be exactly like something in 
heaven. 

Just so, we are set in the world to have visions, to 
go up into the mount, to see, in the presence of God, 
the divine truth concerning human life, and then to 
work it out into character and conduct. I think it 
may be said without exaggeration, without qualifi- 
cation, that in a very real, thorough, broad sense, this 
sums up the thought of Christian living and of the 
purpose of God in our redemption. 

Now I believe it may help a little, if we think 
upon that singular building which Moses was com- 
missioned to build. What may we learn from the 
tabernacle in the wilderness that shall help us in 
reproducing, in character and conduct, heavenly 
things? The commission to Moses was that it was 
to be beautiful. The life that you and I are commis- 
sioned to live, and the character you and I are under 
responsibility to form, must then be, first of all, 
beautiful. 

There have been many ideals of character and 
each of them, no doubt, so formed under Christian 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 271 

influence that they contain important elements of 
truth. The Puritan character was, in many respects, 
most admirable. It had in it elements of strength, 
of sincerity, of simplicity, of great loyalty to God 
and of obedience to what they understood to be the 
will of God. No fragmentary form of character 
could be more noble than the Puritan ideal; and 
yet, as we look closely at that ideal, and as we meas- 
ure it up against Christ, we begin to see that it is 
lacking precisely in this element of beauty. I might 
go on and refer to other ideals of character which 
have been formed by the people of God, but let us 
rather pass by all these incomplete and unsymmetri- 
cal visions of life and think of Jesus Christ. 

In Him there is nothing lacking, nothing in excess. 
Jesus Christ was perfectly strong. No Puritan was 
ever such a rock-man as He, and yet there was noth- 
ing hard or repelling in Christ's firmness; it was 
clothed in gentleness, and because He was supremely 
strong, He could be supremely gentle, patient, and 
sympathetic. In everything God makes there is first 
of all order, then comes symmetry. You remember 
in the 21st chapter of Revelation the description of 
the heavenly Jerusalem and its proportions; the 
breadth and the length and the height of it were 
equal. That is God's idea of symmetry. First of 
all, then, that tabernacle was beautiful, and it was 
beautiful because there was an ordered harmony in 
it. Everything was beautiful. And if we are repro- 
ducing the heavenly character here, then will, accord- 
ing to the prayer of the Psalmist, 



272 IN MANY PULPITS 

"the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us:" 

— Psalms go: 17 

I should say the second characteristic which we 
need to notice in the tabernacle built by Moses was 
its costliness. It was not a cheap thing which Moses 
built. God did not propose that the building in 
which His glory was in a very particular and local 
way to be manifested — and in itself a type of the 
costliest of all costly offerings, Jesus Christ — should 
be without cost. Everything in it was of the most pre- 
cious materials. The very boards were overlaid with 
gold, solid gold. The seven-branched candlestick was 
of gold. There was embroidery of purple and scarlet 
and red and blue with costliest work. The Holy 
Spirit endowed the craftsmen with more than earthly 
wisdom and skill that they might carve and em- 
broider and engrave the beautiful details of that 
edifice. Splendid jewels flashed from the breast-plate 
of the high priest and glittered upon his shoulders. 
Infinite skill of weaving and carving went into it. 
The first thought was beauty then, and the second, 
costliness. 

So these lives of ours will be heavenly in propor- 
tion as cost has gone into them. First of all, the 
unspeakable, the holy, the immeasurable gift and cost 
of our redemption. The costliest gift that heaven 
had was given for us, and we shall never come to 
the acme of Christian character and life without sac- 
rifice — the best and costliest we have to give. It 
costs the renunciation of the lesser that we may have 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 273 

the greater, that we may grasp the choicest things 
and build them into character. 

The third striking characteristic of the tabernacle 
that I should like to mention is that its beauty was 
chiefly inward. All the glory of the gold, and all 
the beauty of the engravers ' and weavers' and em- 
broiderers ' art was covered from outward observation. 
Christ was like that. He was not a man of marvelous 
beauty of visage and outward splendor of appear- 
ance: 

"When we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should 
desire him."- — Isaiah 53:2 

Here, eminently, is a lesson for our day. The great 
temptation is to make religion a matter of externali- 
ties alone; but to be rather than to do, is the central 
thought of God with regard to the character of His 
people; to be beautiful within. 

There is the danger of hypocrisy, the danger that 
we shall seem to be more devoted, more consecrated, 
more engaged with the things of God than we really 
are; and if I read aright the mind of Christ, there 
is nothing for which He feels such an aversion as for 
hypocrisy. And the* essence of hypocrisy is trying 
to seem to be a little sweeter, a little better, a 
little more devoted than we really are. When Moses 
came down from his forty days' visit with Jehovah, 
he had caught the very radiance of God's glory, but 

"Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone" 

— Exodus 34: 2Q 



274 IN MANY PULPITS 

There is nothing more odious than self-conscious 
piety. 

And the tabernacle was not a very great or impos- 
ing structure. The smallest chapel in St. Peter's at 
Rome would hold it. Does the application not make 
itself? We are not called so much to be and do 
something great or imposing, as to beautify our place 
in life. You and I are not very important individuals ; 
we are called to build the tabernacle of character in 
the lowly walks of life, — we are not filling very 
exalted stations. We are likely to be called upon to 
build just along some dusty highway, where the great 
mass of men must walk and suffer and serve, than to 
build it upon some heaven-kissed peak where the 
whole world shall see it. 

In modern life there is a great desire to be con- 
spicuous. It influences us like a vice. We want to 
be known. We want to be pillars. But, have you 
ever thought that the chinking stones are just as 
essential in the temple which God is building, as the 
great massive columns that rest upon them, but 
which all men can see? What does it matter, after 
all, for a few brief years, where we are or what work 
we are engagd in, if only it be we are like Christ as we 
move among men. 

Lastly I want to remark upon our supreme danger. 
It is that we shall change the plan. The repeated ex- 
hortation to Moses was, — 

"See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the 
pattern shewed to thee in the mount." — Hebrews 8<$ 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 275 

Just because of the danger that Moses would forget 
it and change it later on. So there is danger, that as 
we recede from the place of vision, and as the vision 
itself becomes dulled in our memories, we shall build 
lesser, baser things than the vision demands. And 
perhaps the place at which failure enters is at that 
point where we want to substitute brass for gold, 
even wood for brass. And especially too, when Chris- 
tian ideals are lowered by the infusion of pagan 
ideals; — heathen philosophies in the pulpit, and 
pretty little formulas for Christian living that might 
have come bodily out of any pagan religion. 

The danger is that we shall build less of gold, and 
fine linen, and purple and scarlet and blue; that we 
shall put paste jewels into the breast-plate of the 
high priest; that we shall forget, in the little things, 
to make life and character acording to the pattern 
that was shown to us by Christ. 

"But Christ being come an high priest of good things to 
come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made 
with hands" — Hebrews g:n 

"It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in 
the heavens should be purified with these: 
For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with 
hands, which are the figures of the true: but into heaven 
itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us:" 

— Hebrews 9:23, 24 



COMPENSATING VISIONS 



COMPENSATING VISIONS 



"When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall 
see his seed . . . 

He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be sat- 
isfied:" — Isaiah 53:10, 11 

THE fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is one of the 
prophetic foreviews of the crucifixion of Jesus 
Christ. It should be studied with the twenty-second 
Psalm. The latter is descriptive. 

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of 
joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst 
of my bowels. 

My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue 
cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into 
the dust of death. 

For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the 
wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and 
my feet. 

I may tell all my bones; they look and stare upon me. 
They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon 
my vesture." — Psalms 22:14-18 

A marvelous description of death by crucifixion. 
The profuse sweat of intense physical agony, the 
dislocation (of shoulders and pelvis), heart failure, 
thirst, the pierced hands and feet, semi-nudity and 

279 



280 IN MANY PULPITS 

hurt modesty — all these accompanying agonies of 
that most agonizing death are set forth with literal 
exactness. Even the desolate cry, 

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 

— Psalms 22:1 

is given. What a proof to any candid mind of the 
inspiration of the Bible ! How should David foresee 
these things. Crucifixion was a mode of execution 
wholly unknown to ancient Israel. It was a Roman 
invention of later date. The answer is that David 
was an inspired man. But if the twenty-second 
Psalm is a description of the death of Jesus Christ 
written a thousand years before the event, the fifty- 
third chapter of Isaiah is a doctrinal explanation of 
the crucifixion written 700 years before the event. 
When we have read David's wonderful vision of 
the cross we are moved to ask with the divine Sufferer 
Himself, "Why?" Why was such a Being forsaken 
to such a death? Isaiah answers the question: Jesus 
Christ suffered vicariously. He who had never 
sinned was forsaken that we who have sinned might 
not be forsaken. 

"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our 
sorrows: . . . 

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace 
was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. 
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned 
every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on 
him the iniquity of us all." — Isaiah 53:4-6 

"for the transgression of my people was he stricken." 

— Isaiah 53:8 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 281 

And absolutely no other explanation consistent 
with the goodness of God can be given. Whatever 
any other man has suffered was but "buffeting for 
his faults," who deserved, in strict justice, far more. 
But Jesus Christ had no faults. He had always ] 
perfectly loved, perfectly obeyed God. Such a Being, 
in a morally governed universe, could only suffer 
for others. And since, as Plato said, "Sin and suffer- 
ing are riveted together," whoever would 'bear our 
sins/ must of necessity take our place in suffering. 

But while He, as our Substitute, must suffer in our 
stead, the compassion of His father could and did 
Mght up that awful darkness with the vision of the 
results of so great suffering. Christ, in other words, 
was given to see that His pains were birth pangs; 
that His agonies were not merely a doing right by 
the moral order of the universe, an awful but perfect 
vindication of the holy law, a final demonstration 
of His own horror of sin and of God's necessary hatred 
of it — not merely thus were His sufferings to be 
interpreted; but that those very sufferings were truly 
material, the "travail" out of which was being born 
the new creation — this He was permitted to see. 
Who can estimate the enormous joy of that vision? 

"He shall see his seed," — Isaiah 53:10 

"He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be sat- 
isfied." — Isaiah 53:11 

The 

"corn of wheat" — John 12:24 

had indeed come to the moment of death, but in the 



282 IN MANY PULPITS 

very act of dissolution He felt Himself passing into 
countless corns of wheat. If a grain of actual wheat 
were conscious of itself, could feel all our human 
drawing back from death, but could just at the mo- 
ment of ceasing to be, find its consciousness reborn 
into the hope of the new powerful upspringing life 
of the blade forcing itself upward toward the light 
and downward into the warm soft soil, — if this, I 
say, could be, it is easy to see that the new joy of 
the new life would swallow up the transitory pain 
of death. Just so, Isaiah tells us, Jesus Christ saw 
the myriads of the redeemed all born again into the 
very divine life which was, for three days and nights, 
to forsake His torn and agonized body. Think what 
Jesus saw as He hung there in the darkness. 

He saw every individual who would be saved 
through His death. Paul said: 

"who loved me, and gave himself for me." — Galatians 2:20 

And if Paul, then each of us. Does this seem hard 
of belief? Why, even finite creatures, men and 
women, by thousands, have testified that in the 
act of drowning, every act of their lives passed before 
them in an instant of time! And He who hung 
dying on the cross was the God-man. To His human 
consciousness, His human capacity, must be added 
the divine consciousness — the divine capacity. 

He saw a little group of fishermen, who, for the 
most part were Galileans, uncouth of speech, un- 
taught in the wisdom of the world, inelegant and 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 283 

poor, invade in His name the Greek world of culture 
and the Roman world of power. He saw hell moved to 
its depths, and the whole power of Rome, ten times in 
two centuries, launched against an ever-growing but 
always small and obscure band of believers. He saw 
them in the arena, in prisons, in slave pens and cata- 
combs; and He saw them, pale with 200 years of 
suffering, mount the throne of the Caesars. 

He saw the dawn across the long night of centuries. 
He saw the world acknowledge His ethic. He saw 
hospitals and orphanages and schools. He saw wo- 
man no longer the slave of man. He saw childhood 
made sacred. Across the long conflict of good and 
evil He saw His own second coming in glory, and 
the earth, so long drenched with blood and tears, 
swing into the peace and blessing of the millennium. 
And He saw till God had wiped away all tears from 
all faces, till there was 

"no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying," 

— Revelation 21:4 
He saw 

" a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding 
out of the throne of God and of the Lamb " 

— Revelation 21:4 

and He saw His servants, reigning 

"forever and ever." — Revelation 22:5 

His was the triumph of joy over pain. When the 
vision was at its climax He said, 



284 EST MANY PULPITS 

"It is finished; and he bowed his head, and gave up the 
ghost." — John 19:30 

This is what the writer of Hebrews means when he 
says that Jesus 

"for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, 
despising the shame" — Hebrews 12:2 

Have we not here a divine law? Is the compensa- 
tory vision of Jesus Christ a solitary instance? By 
no means. Undoubtedly the crucifixion vision vouch- 
safed to the dying Lord was unique in its extent and 
power. But it was after all but the highest, most 
sublime instance of a great principle of the divine 
dealing. 

When Moses was about to die he 

"went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of 
Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. 
And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto 
Dan, 

And all Napthali, and the land of Ephraim, and Man- 
asseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, 
And the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, 
the city of palm trees, unto Zoar." — Deuteronomy 34:1-3 

What did that mean? It meant that Moses was 
permitted to see that in behalf of which he had 
labored and suffered. As his eye swept that match- 
less panorama of verdure and fruitfulness, the blue 
of distant mountains, whose clefts in the afternoon 
sun seemed inlaid with sapphire and emerald, as 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 285 

he saw the flashing of distant waters and the wav- 
ing of tall trees, we may well believe that his great 
heart beat high, even though its beatings were soon to 
be stilled under the kiss of God; and that as he turned 
to see the desert of the wanderings, and recalled all 
its weariness and pain, Moses murmured: "The least 
of yonder glories is compensation for it all." 
When Paul was 

"ready to be offered" — // Timothy 4:6 

and knew that the time of departing was near, he 
sang his swan song of triumph. 

"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I 
have kept the faith: 

Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteous- 
ness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me 
at that day:"—// Timothy 4:7,8. 

He thought of the years of storm and stress since 
he met Jesus on his way to Damascus. He said: 

"Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. 
Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice 
I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in 
the deep." — // Corinthians 11:24, 25 

"In weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger 
and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." 

— // Corinthians 11:27 

But one gleam of the jewels of that crown, one look 
into the deep eyes of the blessed Lord, one tone of 
His voice as He said, "Well done, Paul; well done, 



286 IN MANY PULPITS 

valiant soldier, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord," 
more than paid for it all. 

We have these balancings of glory against pain. 
Where do we find them? In the promises of God. 
You who are weary of heart look up! 

11 It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we 
shall also live with him: 
If we suffer we shall also reign with him" 

— // Timothy 2:11, 12 



BUSY ABOUT THE 
WRONG THING 



BUSY ABOUT THE 
WRONG THING 

"And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone." 

— / Kings 20:40 

iHE text is part of a little parable, spoken by 
an unnamed prophet to King Ahab. 

"Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle; and, 
behold, a man turned aside, and brought a man unto me, 
and said, Keep this man: if by any means he be missing, 
then shall thy life be for his life, or else thou shalt pay a 
talent of silver. 

And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was 
gone." — / Kings 20:^,40 

Given a man to keep, he had lost the man. And he 
had lost him because he was too busy to keep him. 
Evidently the servant considered that an excuse. Had 
he been idle, then indeed the loss of the man would 
have been an unpardonable offence. Justly enough, 
the king found that but an aggravation of the fault. 
If one to whom we had entrusted millions should lose 
them, would we not find it a poor excuse that he had 
been busy picking up pennies which he had dropped? 
Now let us leave King Ahab and the nameless 
prophet, and come down the centuries to ourselves 

289 



290 IN MANY PULPITS 

for an application. It is an easy application to make, 
for we too have been given a man to keep and our 
most pressing danger is that we shall lose that man, 
just because we are too busy to keep him. The battle 
is the battle of life, the man is ourself , and the peril 
of loss lurks in the engrossing, absorbing character 
of modern life. Never in all the history of the world 
was the battle of life so bitter, so merciless, so ruth- 
less as now. It is not without an instinctive sense of 
fitness that the common speech of the day calls the 
chief business men "captains of industry." Business 
is organized on a vast scale; the unit counts for 
nothing — the mass for everything. The hours of 
the day are not enough for toil, business burns up 
the nights as well. God's rest day is ruthlessly ap- 
propriated ; men are worn out, burnt out rather, and 
left behind without thought or mercy. 

And instinctively we feel that we must keep up 
with the rush or be trampled under foot. Lately a 
famous cartoonist drew a caricature of himself, in 
which unwittingly he characterized us all. He repre- 
sented himself grimly walking on a treadmill. Be- 
hind him were sharp spikes which effectually for- 
bade a pause. Before him — as a wisp of straw is 
dangled before a horse to lure him to a ceaseless task 
— hung a dollar mark, the goal of his weary tramp ; 
a tramp that never ceased, a goal never reached. 
What an amiable satire on modern business life! 
With a very slight change, it might be made to apply 
with equal point to modern social life. What is it 
but the ceaseless round of the treadmill? Before the 



WITH DR. C. I.SCOFIELD 291 

man the elusive dollar, — before his wife an equally- 
elusive phantom, pleasure. And in this two-fold 
pursuit more men and women are lost than in crime 
or debauchery. Crime appeals to the social pervert, 
debauchery to the social degenerate; but on the 
treadmill called "business," and on the treadmill 
called "society," more manhood and womanhood is 
lost than all the churches are saving. 

The man given us to keep is the man whom each 
of us calls "myself." When the battle is over, when 
at last for each of us the tramp of the treadmill ceases, 
when we are lifted from the wheel and another takes 
our place — to be in turn worn out and cast aside — 
the one demand made upon each of us will be for 
the man who was given us to keep. Not — "What 
money did you gather? Not — "What fame did you 
achieve?" Not — "What space did you occupy in 
the social papers?" But, "What man are you?" And 
it never will do to reply: "Lord, 

'as thy servant was busy here and there' — / Kings 20:40 

the manhood, the womanhood dwindled; the soul 
shriveled to the inconceivably mean measure of that 
which I pursued: Lord, — 

'as thy servant was busy here and there' — / Kings 20:40 

the man, the woman Thou gavest me to keep was 
gone." 

If, anticipating tne day, yet future, thank God, 
when the Lord of life will demand of us the man He 
gave us to keep, we were to stop today and make that 
demand of ourselves, what answer could we give? 



292 IN MANY PULPITS 

Where is the boy He gave us to keep? As each 
of us remembers himself in boyhood, I am sure some 
accusing sense must come over us all of foul wrong 
done to the boy. Might I not have done better by 
that little fellow who was then that strange being 
whom I now call "myself"? Thirty years elapsed 
between the surrender at Appomattox and my next 
visit to Richmond. I arrived early in the morning of a 
summer day and walked over to the Capitol square. 
The larger facts were unchanged. There was the 
old Capitol, under whose roof I had heard Yancey 
and Hunter and Stephens and a host of the giants of 
that day. The great trees were still there and across 
the square the executive mansion of Virginia, in whose 
doorway I had for the first time seen Robert E. 
Lee. All that came easily back. But where was the 
boy in Confederate butternut, who had seen it all? 
My answer was the foolish one of the prophet's 
parable : 

"As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone." 

— / Kings 20:40 

And I felt with a sudden sternness, that were another 
to deal now by my boy as I had dealt by that war 
time boy "myself," I should hold him to a strict 
accounting. 

What have we — pursuing still that self-judgment 
of which I have spoken — done with the young man 
who was given us to keep? Have we lost him too, in 
being busy? Is this careworn, bowed man of today 
— worn and bowed in the petty, contemptible strife 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 293 

for dollars and place and position — what we have 
made of him? Happy indeed, if we have not made 
him into a cruel and selfish monster. 

You remember Andrew Lang's verses on three 
portraits of Prince Charlie, the last of the Stuarts: 

1731 

Beautiful face of a child, 

Lighted with laughter and glee, 
Mirthful, and tender, and wild, 

My heart is heavy for thee! 

1744 

Beautiful face of a youth, 

As an eagle poised to fly forth 
To the old land loyal of truth, 

To the hills and the sounds of the North: 
Fair face, daring and proud, 

Lo! the shadow of doom, even now, 
The fate of thy line, like a cloud, 

Rests on the grace of thy brow! 

1773 

Cruel and angry face, 

Hateful and heavy with wine, 
Where are the gladness, the grace, 

The beauty, the mirth that were thine? 
Ah, my Prince, it were well — 

Hadst thou to the gods been dear, — 
To have fallen where Keppoch fell, 

With the war-pipe loud in thine ear! 
To have died with never a stain 

On the fair White Rose of Renown, 
To have fallen, fighting in vain, 

For, thy father, thy faith, and thy crown! 



294 IN MANY PULPITS 

No, we cannot accuse ourselves of idleness, but we 
may have been busy about the wrong thing. We 
have been given a man to keep and if we have lost 
him, all our achievements, however splendid, are 
worse than useless. 

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole 
world, and lose his own soul?" — Mark 8:36 

There are three important senses in which, in the 
rush and preoccupation of our modern life, we are in 
danger of losing the man given us to keep. And 
first I place the eternal sense. For this man given us 
to keep, whom each of us calls "myself" is an im- 
mortal being. He is a special creation of God. An 
animal as to his body, he is "theopneustos" — God- 
breathed — as to his essential being. He is the "off- 
spring" of the Eternal Father. He lives in a universe 
the final basis of which is moral and spiritual, not 
material. He cannot escape from that universe if 
he would. He must meet God, and must meet Him 
on the one single issue — his personal treatment of 
the Son of God. 

Furthermore, this man who was given us to keep 
is the raw material out of which the renewing spirit 
makes sons of God by the marvel of the new birth. 
That is the true destiny of the man given us to keep. 
Made a little lower than the angels, his destiny, in the 
divine plan, and the divine desire, is far above the 
angels in an eternal oneness with God Himself. For 
that reason he has been made capable of infinite per- 
fection, infinite bliss. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 295 

At God's right hand — where the man given us to 
keep belongs — are pleasures forevermore. Pleasures 
of the senses purified from sin; pleasures of the 
intellect, emancipated from fleshly limitations ; pleas- 
ures of the soul beyond description or conception. 
But along with this infinite capacity of enjoyment, the 
man given us to keep has an infinite capacity of suf- 
fering. If he turns from the felicities of manhood 
made holy, he must endure the woes of manhood 
made devilish. It is for you and me to say which 
of these eternal destinies, the man given us to keep 
shall have. What have we chosen? 

We may lose the man given us to keep in an im- 
portant personal sense. He is susceptible of all but 
illimitable development. He has an intellectual 
capacity to receive knowledge, to reason upon that 
knowledge, to light the flame of imagination, to com- 
mune with the sages and the seers, to enter — humbly 
it may be, and at their feet — the society of thinkers, 
poets, of statesmen and philanthropists who have en- 
larged the empire of the mind and filled it with the 
most intellectual delights. 

The man given us to keep has an emotional nature 
capable of love, of friendship, of the holy family 
relationships. He may live in spheres of love or 
hate. He may love nobly or ignobly. He may fill 
this capacity of his with heaven or hell. What have 
we done with him? Have we taught him to live 
greatly, even though obscurely; or to live basely, 
even though conspicuously? Have we made of him 
a wise man or a fool? Have you noticed that the 



296 IN MANY PULPITS 

man whom Jesus Christ called a fool was a most 
successful man, as the world counts success? He was 
a man who had much goods, enough for many years, 
laid up; but he was a fool because he invited his 
soul to live on these things. 

Finally there is another sense in which we may 
lose the man given us to keep. We may teach him 
to center his life energies and capacities upon himself, 
and so, whatever we may have taught him to call 
himself, make of him a pagan. For just as truly as 
Jesus Christ brought a new life into the world and 
opened the door of it to all who will trust Him, just 
as surely did He bring a new philosophy of life. 
Before Christ, religion consisted in certain sacrifices 
and in personal affection for God. Life then was 
hoarded. But the religion which Jesus Christ de- 
clares to be "pure" is — 

"To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and 
to keep himself unspotted from the world." — James 1:27 

Have we made the man, given us to keep, clean, 
brave and knightly in all unselfish service? Have 
we developed him along all the lines of his varied 
capacity? Above all, have we brought him into right 
relations with Jesus Christ? 



JOY 



JOY 



"That they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." 

— John 17:13 

IT is not uncharitable to say that many people in 
this world are content if they be merry ; they seek 
nothing higher from life than such a surface stirring 
of their shallow nature as pleasure brings. If they 
may put far from them the burden and sorrow and 
care of this world, and forget its griefs in passing jest, 
they are content. Better than this, and the pursuit I 
would fain believe of a far greater number, is happi- 
ness. Happiness is an infinitely higher thing than 
pleasure. That it is the desire of God His children 
should be happy, is a fact to which page after page 
of the Bible bears witness: — 

"That they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." 

— John 17:13 

But our text holds something which is better even 
than happiness — and that is joyousness. I find it 
is not easy, at least for me, to define precisely what 
joyfulness, in the Scriptural sense of the word, is. 
Perhaps it might be defined as happiness overflowing, 
happiness militant and aggressive; happiness going 
out and beyond itself, too full to be used up in mere 
personal satisfaction, an overabundance of happiness; 
happiness alive and aglow; happiness reaching out 

299 



300 IN MANY PULPITS 

and desiring to shine beyond the limits of one's own 
soul. 

It may help us at the beginning to fix in our minds 
three things which stand over against sorrow or pain: 
pleasure, existing for and ending upon self; happi- 
ness, a deeper, nobler thing; and joyousness, which 
is the overflowing of happiness. If happiness might 
be compared to a tranquil lake embosomed in pro- 
tecting hills, joyousness would be like a mighty river 
flowing out. 

"That they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." 

— John 17:13 

We have here two simple ideas: Jesus Christ filled 
with joy — ourselves privileged to partake of that 
joy until we are filled with it. 

Now we do not habitually think of Jesus Christ as 
joyful. Long before His manifestation, the prophet 
Isaiah had said of Him that He would be 

"a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief:" 

— Isaiah 53:3 

and so it was. But observe, "a man of sorrows," not 
of melancholy. We cannot think of Jesus Christ as 
moping through life; we cannot think of Him as 
turning fretfully toward His burden; as thinking of 
His wrongs, of His throne denied Him, of His people 
rejecting Him, and of His poverty and humiliation 
in a world which He had made. We have a very 
poor conception indeed of the character of Jesus 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 301 

Christ, if we think it was these things which made 
Him "a man of sorrows." 

Yet He was a "man of sorrows." He said in Geth- 
semane: 

"My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death" 

— Matthew 26:38 

But habitually He speaks of His joyfulness. This 
is the paradox of Christ's life. 

"A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" 

— Isaiah 53:3 

yet bearing those sorrows upon a flood-tide, as it 
were, of a mighty joy. And the joy was more than 
the sorrow. An exultant and joyful man of sorrows 
— let us try to understand this paradox. 

Have you ever noticed that the nearer Jesus came 
to the cross, the more He spoke of His joy? You 
do not find Him testifying much of His joyfulness in 
the earlier part of His ministry, and I believe not 
once in that which is called "the year of public favor," 
when the multitudes thronged Him and it seemed as 
if the nation were really turning to the long expected 
Messiah. But as Jesus went on, drawing ever nearer 
to Calvary, as the burden of the shame and sin and 
sorrow of the world began to gather in awful dark- 
ness over Him, observe how He speaks more and 
more of His joyfulness; and in the closing admoni- 
tions and instructions in the latter chapters of John's 
Gospel, there is a constant reference to the deep joy 



302 IN MANY PULPITS 

which filled Jesus. Just when the sorrow is be- 
coming deepest, the joyfulness seems to rise above it 
and triumph over it. If we ponder that, and connect 
it with the prophet's explanation of the sorrows of the 
Lord Jesus Christ: 

"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows:" 

— Isaiah 53:4 

I think we shall be upon the very verge of solving 
the paradox. 

In other words — and is it not very simple — Jesus 
found His supreme joy in bearing the sorrow of 
others. He was not joyful in spite of having the priv- 
ilege of getting underneath the sorrow and burden 
and guilt of the world, but He was joyful because of 
this privilege. It was the great fountain head of 
His joy, the very source of it. He found His joy 
in the cross. 

We can conceive of that, I think, if we are willing 
to separate ourselves for a moment from that shrink- 
ing which we all feel at the thought of pain and 
sorrow, and get upon the nobler side of our own souls. 
We can understand that such a Being as Jesus would 
rejoice with joy unspeakable, that He could do that 
thing. We can understand how, when looking down 
on this world with its sin and misery and want and 
woe and mountainous iniquity, there would be ever 
in His heart the exultant joy of knowing that it was 
He who, in due time, should come down here and get 
underneath all that unspeakable guilt, and bear it 
away from man up to the cross. Just as Jean Valjean 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 303 

was happy under the cart. It hurt him, but he lifted 
it away from the old man who was being crushed by 
it. There was joy in doing it, a joy in getting 
underneath it, a joy in the very pain which it cost 
to do it. 

"But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I 
straitened till it be accomplished!" — Luke 12:50 

Put over against this the introspective self pity, 
which keeps us forever occupied with our own little 
round of common sorrows and infirmities, such as 
belong to the life here, and such as one would say 
ought to be manfully borne. My friends, farther 
than the east is from the west or the brightest sun- 
light from the darkness of midnight, is this Christ 
temper of soul from the pettiness of a self-centered 
life. The joy of vicarious suffering, the joy of getting 
underneath all that was bearing down the heart of 
humanity and lifting it helpfully away, — this was 
the joy of the Lord. 

You know how very easily this truth finds illus- 
tration. Surely Winkelried must have felt something 
of that joy when he gathered the spears of the 
enemy into his own bosom, that he might break the 
hostile line and make way for liberty. There must 
have been in his heart an ineffable joy as he felt those 
spears crushing into it and his life going out. It was 
a joyful thing so to die. 

There was another source of the joy of the Lord. 
He rejoiced in the will of God. Will you consider 
that for a moment? What a joyful thing it is not 



304 IN MANY PULPITS 

to be left alone in this world! What a joyful thing 
to know that one is not the sport of circumstances 
nor of accident; not in a world where things are 
suffered to take their course; not orphaned amidst 
all these destructive forces that move in upon us, 
as children of God in this world; to know in short, 
that over all there is the resistless will of God. Things 
are not happening to the children of God. We are 
moving upon an appointed course, and the joys and 
sorrows of our life are all appointed and portioned 
out, moulding and shaping us for better things. We 
have our rejoicing, not in the pain, not in the de- 
privation, not in the disappointment, but in the great 
overmastering will which has sent these things. 

Then again, what a joy the Lord found in His 
mission of salvation. 

"How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one 
of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and 
nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that 
which is gone astray? 

And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he 
rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine 
which went not astray." — Matthew 18:12, 13 

The joy of being a Saviour ! Dear friends, how great 
a thing it is to have one soul saved, to have hell 
closed and glory opened forever to one more im- 
mortal soul! Jesus rejoicing over one sheep, and the 
angels rejoicing with Him! This was the joy of the 
Lord Jesus. Isaiah brings it out: 

"He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be sat- 
isfied : " — Isaiah 53:11 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 305 

The joy of coming underneath human guilt as well 
as sorrow and pain and burden, and bearing that 
guilt away vicariously, that is the supreme joy of 
the Lord, — the joy of suffering that others might 
not suffer. I think that pilot who kept his burning 
boat against the shore until every passenger was safe, 
though his own hands were burning to a crisp as he 
held the wheel, must have known a joy greater than 
the pain. This is a very high kind of joy. I think 
that captain who stood upon the deck of his sinking 
ship, and gave his place in the last boat to a poor 
stowaway who had no kind of claim upon him, and 
saw the stowaway pass on into safety, while he went 
down with his ship, must have drunk deeply of this 
joy of suffering. Paul was in the very fellowship of 
this compensating joy when he wrote: 

"Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that 
which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for 
his body's sake, which is the church:" — Colossians 1:24 

If He suffered the others were spared; there was joy 
in that. But this joy of vicarious suffering is not 
the only source of the joy of the Lord. There are 
passages in which others are indicated. 

"In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank 
thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast 
hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
revealed them unto babes:" — Luke 10:21 

Do you know what that meant? Jesus had sent out 
the seventy to announce the kingdom as at hand; to 



306 IN MANY PULPITS 

go everywhere, into all the villages and sound the glad 
tidings, that at last Israel's King had come, and that 
the kingdom was ready. And they returned filled 
with pride and gratification that the demons had been 
subject to them. They had not made one convert! 
The mission to Israel was an absolute failure — Jesus 
saw that. The thing was hid from the rulers, was hid 
from the nation, and was revealed to a few fishermen 
and tax-gatherers and converted harlots. In that 
hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit! Why? Hear His own 
words: 

"for so it seemed good in thy sight." — Luke 10:21 

In the Hebrews we are told of another source of 
joy which sustained our Lord in the supreme agony 
on the cross. 

"Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; 
who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, 
despising the shame," — Hebrews 12:2 

The joy of final consummation; the joy in antici- 
pation of the fruition of all His suffering, when 
He should see and eternally enjoy the results of it; 
the joy of putting away the sins of men, of transform- 
ing them into His own image, and of sharing with 
them the eternal felicities. All this was with Him 
helpfully in the supreme hour. That is what we need 
to see. Beyond question we do not live enough in the 
inspiration of the compensations and balancing of 
heaven. 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 307 

Turn now for a moment to the other thought — the 
human side of joy. 

"That they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves." 

— John 17:13 

What does the Lord mean, that we shall have His 
joy? How shall we have the joy of the Lord? Evi- 
dently, dear friends, it is an arduous matter; it is a 
call to unselfish heights. If we are to share the joy 
of the Lord, we must be willing to share that out of 
which sprang His joy. We must rejoice if we can 
bear away some sorrow from another heart, some 
burden from another life. We must learn to rejoice, 
as we never yet have learned to rejoice, in the salva- 
tion of the lost. We read that there 

"is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner 
that repenteth." — Luke 15:10 

Sometimes we "get up" a revival, and after it is over 
and we are asked concerning the success of the meet- 
ing, answer that it was a disappointment, only (say) 
ten converted. We must get out of that, and like 
the angels of God rejoice 

"over one sinner that repenteth." — Luke 15:10 

Then we must turn our thoughts more towards the 
future, towards the heavenly rest, the heavenly activ- 
ities and the eternal joys which are there. I repeat 
it is a trumpet call. It costs something to have the 
joy of the Lord. Salvation, with its joy, is a free gift, 
but the joy of the Lord is to be had only by entering 



308 IN MANY PULPITS 

into fellowship with the Lord in His path; to 
be, in the measure of our capacity, Christs in the 
world; to get with Him into the joy of suffering; the 
joy of the great sweet will of God; the expectation 
of the things to come. 

It was a great thing for humanity when that 
strange being, Peter the Hermit, went through Eu- 
rope preaching the crusades. It was a call to barons 
and knights to cease their petty neighborhood wars; 
their pompous and empty way of life; their tilting 
at wooden blocks in the castle yard; their f eastings 
in castle halls; and to go forth and do an unselfish 
thing — to rescue an empty tomb. It was the letting 
in of the light. It was the lifting of men out of their 
narrowness and mean conception of life. 

Is there not a perpetual crusade being preached 
from the blessed Word, calling us up out of the 
petty things in which our lives are being frittered 
away; a crusade which calls us to go out upon 
Christ's own great emprise of salvation into the utter- 
most parts of the earth? There is something in this 
that ought to lay hold of the nobler side of us — that 
ought to have power to redeem us from small and 
ignoble things, that ought to lift us into that clear, 
pure atmosphere of suffering. Yes, but also of the 
unspeakable joy of the Lord, a 

"joy no man taketh from you." — John 16:22 



THE LOVELINESS OF CHRIST 



THE LOVELINESS OF CHRIST 

"Yea, he is altogether lovely." — Song of Solomon 5:16 

JESUS CHRIST is the only being of whom, with- 
out gross flattery, it could be asserted, "He is 
altogether lovely." All other greatness has been 
marred by littleness, all other wisdom has been flawed 
by folly, all other goodness has been tainted by im- 
perfection. 

It seems to me, this loveliness of Christ consists 
first of all in His perfect humanity. Understand me, 
I do not now mean that He was a perfect human, but 
that He was perfectly human. In everything but 
our sins, and our evil natures, he is one with us. He 
grew in stature, and in grace. He labored, and wept, 
and prayed, and loved. He was tempted in all points 
as we are — sin apart. With Thomas, we confess 
him Lord and God ; we adore and revere Him. But, 
beloved, there is no other who establishes with us 
such intimacy, who comes so close to these human 
hearts of ours; no one in the universe of whom we 
are so little afraid. He enters as simply and natu- 
rally into our twentieth century lives as if He had 
been reared in the same street. He is not one of the 

3" 



312 IN MANY PULPITS 

ancients. How wholesomely and genuinely human 
He is. Martha scolds Him ; John, who has seen Him 
raise the dead, still the tempest and talk with Moses 
and Elijah on the Mount, does not hesitate to make 
a pillow of His breast at supper. Peter will not let 
Him wash his feet, but afterwards wants His head 
and hands included in the ablution. They ask Him 
foolish questions, and rebuke Him, and venerate and 
adore Him all in a breath; and He calls them by their 
first name, and tells them to fear not, and assures 
them of His love. In all this He seems to me alto- 
gether lovely. His perfection does not glitter, it 
glows. The saintliness of Jesus is so warm and 
human it attracts and inspires. We find in it nothing 
austere and inaccessible, like a statue in a niche. 
The beauty of His holiness reminds one rather of a 
rose, or a bank of violets. 

O, my readers, I protest with all my mind against 
the cold abstraction which mysticism and theology 
have made and labeled "Jesus." The real Jesus — 
He of Nazareth and of the glory — is so perfectly 
holy that He does not need to insist upon it. Our 
little righteousnesses are so puny that they must be 
obtruded, and coddled, and accentuated by Pharisai- 
cal drawings away of the skirts, and the setting up of 
little standards of differences between sinner and 
sinner. Jesus receives sinners and eats with them — 
all kinds of sinners. Nicodemus, the moral, religious 
sinner, and Mary of Magdala, 

"out of whom went seven devils" — Luke 8:2 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 313 

the shocking kind of sinner. He comes into sinful 
lives as a bright, clear stream enters a stagnant pool. 
The stream is not afraid of contamination, but its 
sweet energy cleanses the pool. 

I remark again, and as connected with this, that 
His sympathy is altogether lovely. He is always 
being 

"moved with compassion." — Matthew g:$6 

The multitude without a shepherd, the sorrowing 
widow of Nain, the little dead child of the ruler, the 
demoniac of Gadara, the hungry five thousand — 
whatever suffers touches Jesus. His very wrath 
against the scribes and Pharisees is but the excess of 
His sympathy for those who suffer under their hard 
self-righteousness. 

Did you ever find Jesus looking for "deserving 
poor?" He 

"healed all that were sick." — Matthew 8:16 

And what grace in His sympathy ! Why did He touch 
that poor leper? He could have healed him with a 
word as He did the nobleman's son. Why, for years 
the wretch had been an outcast, cut off from kin, de- 
humanized. He had lost the sense of being a man. 
It was defilement to approach him. Well, the touch 
of Jesus made him human again. A Christian woman, 
laboring among the moral lepers of London, found a 
poor street girl desperately ill in a bare, cold room. 
With her own hands she ministered to her, changing 
her bed linen, procuring medicines, nourishing food, 



314 



IN MANY PULPITS 



a fire, and making the poor place as bright and cheery 
as possible. Then she said, "May I pray with you?" 
"No," said the girl, "you don't care for me; you are 
doing this to get to heaven." Many days passed, the 
Christian woman un wearily kind, the sinful girl hard 
and bitter. At last the Christian said: "My dear, 
you are nearly well now, and I shall not come again, 
but as it is my last visit, I want you to let me kiss 
you," and the pure lips that had known only prayers 
and holy words met the lips defiled by oaths and by 
unholy caresses — and then, my friends, the hard 
heart broke. That was Christ's way. 

Can you fancy Him calling a convention of phari- 
sees to discuss methods of reaching the "masses"? 
And that leads me to remark that His humility was 
altogether lovely, and He, the only one who ever had 
the choice of how and where He should be born, en- 
tered this life as one of "the masses." With a gesture 
he could have caused to rise about that birth couch 
the walls of a palace filled with every luxury, but He 
chose a stable for a birth chamber and a manger for 
a cradle. 

"The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have 
nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his 
head." — Matthew 8:20 



During all His public ministry he had not where to 
lay His head. Why? That the poorest wretch on 
earth might feel that God could really sympathize 
with him. 

The other day I received a letter from a poor prodi- 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 315 

gal who, when he wrote, had been two days without 
food or bed. "At night," he says, "I think that my 
Lord, too, 

'hath not where to lay his head/ " — Matthew 8:20 

What meekness, what lowliness! 

"I am among you as he that serveth." — Luke 22:27 
"After that he . . . began to wash the disciples' feet." 

— John 13:5 
"When he was reviled, he reviled not again." — / Peter 2:23 
"As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth 
not his mouth." — Isaiah 53:7 

Can you think of Jesus posing and demanding His 
rights? 

But it is in His way with sinners that the supreme 
loveliness of Jesus is most sweetly shown. How 
gentle He is, yet how faithful; how considerate, how 
respectful! Nicodemus, candid and sincere, but 
proud of his position as a master in Israel, and timid 
lest he should imperil it, comes 

"to Jesus by night." — John 7:50 

Before he departs, Nicodemus has learned his utter 
ignorance of the first step toward the kingdom, and 
goes away to think over the personal application of 

"men loved darkness rather than light, because their 
deeds were evil." — John 3:19 

But he has not heard one harsh word, one utterance 
that can wound his self respect. 



316 IN MANY PULPITS 

Follow Jesus to Jacob's well at high noon and hear 
His conversation with the woman of Samaria. How 
patiently He unfolds the deepest truths, how gently 
yet faithfully He presses the great ulcer of sin which 
is eating away her soul. He could not be more re- 
spectful to Mary of Bethany. When He speaks to 
the silent, despairing woman taken in adultery after 
her accusers have gone out one by one, He uses the 
same word for "woman" as that with which He ad- 
dresses His own mother from the cross. It is as if 
He said, "Madame." 

"Woman, . . . hath no man condemned thee?" — John 8:10 

Even in the agonies of death Jesus could hear the 
cry of despairing faith. When conquerors return 
from far wars in strange lands they bring their chief- 
est captive as a trophy. It was enough for Christ to 
take back to heaven the soul of a thief. 

Yea, he is altogether lovely. And now I have left 
myself no time to speak of his loveliness, of his gentle 
dignity, of his virile manliness, of his perfect courage. 
There is in Jesus a perfect equipoise of various per- 
fections. All the elements of perfect character are in 
lovely balance. His gentleness is never weak. His 
courage is never brutal. My friends, you may study 
these things for yourselves. Follow Him through all 
the scenes of outrage and insult on the night and 
morning of His arrest and trial. Behold him before 
the high priest, before Herod, before Pilate. See 
Him browbeaten, bullied, scourged, smitten upon the 
face, spit upon, mocked. Now His inherent greatness 



WITH DR. C. I. SCOFIELD 317 

comes out. Not once does He lose His self-poise, His 
high dignity. 

Let us follow Him still further. Go with the jeer- 
ing crowd without the gate; see Him stretched upon 
the great rough cross and hear the dreadful sound of 
the sledge as the spikes are forced through His 
hands and feet. As the yelling mob falls back, see 
the cross, bearing this gentlest, sweetest, bravest, 
loveliest man, upreared until it falls into its socket in 
the rock. 

"And sitting down, they watched him there;" 

— Matthew 27:36 

You watch, too. Hear Jesus ask the Father to for- 
give His murderers, hear all the cries from the cross. 
Is He not altogether lovely? What does it all mean? 

"Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the 

tree," — 1 Peter 2:24 
"And by him all that believe are justified from all things." 

— Acts 13: 39 
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me 

hath everlasting life." — John 6:47 

I close with a word of personal testimony, 

"This is my beloved, and this is my friend." 

— Song of Solomon 5:16 

Will you not accept Him as your Saviour, and Be- 
loved, and Friend — this gentle, lovely Jesus? 

"Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none 
other name under heaven given among men, whereby 
we must be saved." — Acts 4:12 



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